The Magnificent Seven

I'm not for banning anything; creators should have freedom as long as they're not infringing on anyone's rights, but making remakes of films like The Magnificent Seven, especially a film that is itself a remake, is just odd. The new film absolutely lacks any atmosphere; I didn't get a sense of the Wild West or get closer to the characters at all. Points are only awarded for the shootouts, which, on the other hand, are absolutely fantastic. (16/01/2017)

A decent and restrained remake of an immortal classic for today's times, bigger, noisier and more ethnically colourful, i.e. politically correct in the way that is befitting and appropriate in every other great film today. Washington pulls it off by walking, looking, and occasionally tossing in a morsel of wisdom, Pratt pulls it off by making wisecracks, and D'Onofrio plays the bear. The rest are essentially extras, which is a shame in the case of Hawke. It should be noted that the execution is also interesting. It’s top-notch, of course, with a fairly weird mix of classic, almost absurd shootout scenes where the good guys shoot in all directions and the bad guys fall like flies, plus well-shot fights mostly with bows, knives, etc. If it was R-rated with more catchphrases, it would have been exactly what everyone wants these days. But Fuqua had too much respect for the original and in his delivery it is both good and bad. (23/09/2016)

Condemning it because of nostalgia or resistance to correctness is, of course, stupid. The film has problems elsewhere. The cast is strong, but Fuqua doesn't get much out of it, especially in the first half, just a demonstration of photogenic faces and poses. Things come to light in the final battle, and until then, sometimes a one-liner here and there sparkles, which Nic Pizzolatto knows how to write. The last third is a pleasant old-school battle with a good pace and quite pleasantly chosen deaths in the group. The problem of The Magnificent Seven is precisely that they are somehow indecisively straddled between a classic western and a buddy action film with a more modern style. When in the end there is a "Technicolor" palette with tombs and the notorious melody of Elmer Bernstein, it feels completely false. The golden age of the western is gone and this group rather swiftly passed it by. Which, given its composition, is actually too little. Sympathetic *** (01/01/2017)

The Magnificent Seven, a deep-rooted concept in the world of cinema, an immortal opus that became a benchmark of the genre. Remaking this legend automatically confronted the filmmakers with a problem, the failure of which I felt almost constantly throughout the film. The problem was to make it a dynamic western, complex enough to satisfy contemporary audiences spoiled by the golden age of film technology, that at the same time would be a little old-fashioned and not too auteur-driven to satisfy die-hard fans of the original and classic western as such. Its failure could be tolerated just fine under the right circumstances, especially considering my personal sympathies for the cast and crew, some of director Fuqua's earlier work, and the tragically deceased composer Horner, who managed to flesh out the original legendary melody into a rather impressive atmospheric medley of his tried-and-true themes from Enemy at the Gates and Avatar. What bothered me a lot, though, was the terribly predictable layout of the script, which, while trying to dress up the original story in an unadorned modern garb and give the characters different motivations for their impossible heroic act, repeatedly applies the cheapest adventure movie clichés and uses an utterly primitive development formula that could have gone something like this: A) sparking the conflict and motivating the handsome heroine to seek revenge; B) persuasion: first the heroine persuades the protagonist to protect the locals, and then travels the country looking for help; C) finding and training the villagers; d) the final battle. Four stages of the story and, unfortunately, nothing in between to highlight them in any way on an emotional, psychological or narrative level. The main villain just acts expediently to give the "good guys" as much motivation as possible, and the group of intrepid gunslingers agree without any hesitation to take part in a mission that means almost certain death. On top of that, the titular seven, who in the original film where made up of distinct and complementary characters, now suspiciously merge into one characteristically unidirectional, but ethnically well-mixed cultural stew, from which we remember in hindsight perhaps only the carefree grin of Chris Pratt or the nervous grimaces of the only potentially contradictory figure, Ethan Hawk. As expected, the only thing that really makes the film worth watching is the fantastic audiovisual aspect, which means the two central shootouts are a truly intoxicating western experience, while the trivial riding scenes across the typical Wild West landscape are also a feast for the eyes thanks to the beautiful photography, or, specifically, Denzel Washington's final mid-shot as he emerges from the house to meet his arch rival, shot from a majestic overhead and with dust swirling against a sunlit backdrop – certainly one of the freshest shots of the year. (27/09/2016)

It's not a bad film, I'll probably like it even more the second time around, because it's not about anything other than entertaining the viewer and not embarrassing itself, and that's a pretty sympathetic approach. Still, I'm sorry that there wasn't a more imaginative remake that would have put The Magnificent Seven in a different setting - it could have been a gangster movie, a story from the Second World War, a Cold War retro, sci-fi from another planet... Look what Pixar did with that tired plot in A Bug's Life. (17/02/2017)