A
couple of caveats. 1) I’ve seen neither
the original Magnificent Seven nor Seven Samurai, so I can’t tell you a
thing about how this movie stacks up to either.
2) I’m not much a Western person in general; the classic Western I’ve
seen have mostly been for film classes in college, and modern remakes I’ve seen
draw me in either with the creative team (True
Grit) or the cast (3:10 to Yuma,
this film.) All of which is to say, my
opinion here is even more uniformed than usual.
Sam
Chisholm, a straight-shooting warrant officer, agrees to the impossible when he
accepts a job from the desperate Emma. A
ruthless industrialist has sunk his claws into her village, greedy for the
land, and is driving the townsfolk out by any means necessary. As is repeatedly stated, it’ll take an “army”
to loosen his grip on the town, and Chisholm enlists a disparate group of hired
guns to lead the charge.
Overall
verdict? Middling but entertaining. The plot is a fairly uncomplicated dust-up,
with familiar character types hitting familiar beats. Much of the story and most of the characters
are drawn pretty thinly; you can see the “now’s the time to decide what sort of
man you’re gonna be” moments coming from quite a ways away. I think the film would’ve benefited from
more interaction between the titular seven; the cast has good chemistry
together, but the story doesn’t always take full advantage of it. That said, to my untrained eye, the action is
pretty cool. Although Billy the expert knife-thrower
is the biggest badass for my money, all the main characters get at least one
standout sequence in which to do their stuff.
Like I
said, it was the cast that brought me to the film, and in this particular case,
it was the diversity of the cast. I’m
happy to have a Western that actually acknowledges the fact that people of
color existed at the time (“buckaroo” comes from the Spanish word vaquero – never forget,) and while I
don’t feel the film uses its ensemble as well as it should, I do appreciate it
as a step in the right direction. (More
on this another day.)
Speaking
of the cast, everyone does well and, for the most part, brings more life to
their character than is evident in the script.
Denzel Washington plays the capable, even-keeled Chisholm with
effortless cool, and Chris Pratt turns in a dependable performance as Faraday,
a gambler looking out for number one.
Byung-hun Lee’s Billy steals the movie with his mad knife skills and
plays well off of Ethan Hawke’s Robicheaux, a slick-talking sharpshooter. Rounding out the ensemble is the engaging
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as the charming outlaw Vasquez, a gleefully scenery-chewing
Vincent D’Onfrio as the kooky Jack, and the understated Martin Sensmeier as the
stoic Red Harvest. The only misstep in
my book is Peter Sarsgaard, who doesn’t quite work for me as the baddie, and
I’m not sure why; it’s the sort of guy he could play in his sleep, but his
performance never fully comes together.
Warnings
Old-timey
shoot-em-up violence, sexual references, drinking/smoking, language, and
thematic elements.
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