Fast-paced and fun, director Antoine Fuqua’s “The Magnificent Seven” is pure popcorn entertainment. Keeping the basic premise and giving an occasional “tip-of-the-hat” respectful nod to John Sturges’ 1960 original, the new “Seven’s” more in line with bringing back everything you’ve loved from the classic American Western film genre. With well-choreographed action scenes and a likable cast, the formulaic stays fresh and the stereotypes don’t get stale.
Giving audiences a likable cast to keep the formula fresh is basically what I said about Fuqua’s boxing film from last year, “Southpaw” with Jake Gyllenhaal (my archives-July 2015). Maybe it’s Fuqua’s métier or maybe old fashioned westerns don’t come down the pike very often that I found “Seven’s” clichés comforting and enjoyed watching actors I like sling six-shooters. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed “Seven” because a good western knows what you want and Fuqua knows it too. In fact, Yul Brynner, star of the original “Seven,” said it best when asked to describe his character that assembles six gunmen to protect a Mexican village from outlaw Calvera (Eli Wallach). Brynner said there were only two clean things about him: his gun and his soul. Yeah, Yul, that’s what we want- a true-blue good guy who won’t hesitate to make a bad guy black-and-blue. In the new “Seven,” Fuqua gets his true-blue lead actor Denzel Washington (whom he’s also directed in “Training Day” and “The Equalizer”) to take over Yul’s part of the guy who builds the gang.
Washington plays Sam Chisolm (not of trail fame), a bounty hunter in 1879’s Western plains who is asked by Rose Creek resident Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) to save her town from the evil industrialist Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), who’s set to grab up all the land in Rose Creek for his mining operation. How bad is Bogue? In the first fifteen minutes of the movie, Bogue reduces Rose Creek to a burned-out church with a few dead townsfolk lying in the street to show he means business. Bogue wants Rose Creek to comply with his land acquisition plans in three weeks’ time or else. As one of the newly-dead is Emma’s husband, Emma wants justice. Needing to fight to save their land but not savvy with shooting, the residents of Rose Creek collect money for Emma to go find some outside gun fighting talent. They give her everything they have: when Emma offers it to Chisolm, we get to hear Denzel utter Yul’s famous line, “I’ve been offered a lot for my work, but never everything.”
Chisolm builds the gang and we know it’s not for the money or the fact that the newly-widowed Emma looks like Jennifer Lawrence with red hair, we know it’s because he’s a true-blue good guy. As are the people Chisholm collects along the way to Rose Creek to save it: gambler Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt), Civil War hero Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) and his co-hort Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), tracker Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), Mexican gunfighter Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and Native American Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier). Sure, they’ve got their peccadilloes- Faraday doesn’t respect Mexicans, Horne scalps Native Americans, Goodnight’s so shaken from the War he’s afraid to shoot- and Chisolm has assembled this group through varying degrees of benign bribery and blackmail, but we know they’ll get along and fight together because down deep they all know it’s the right thing to do.
“Seven” climaxes with the inevitable final showdown in Rose Creek as any good western should and that’s exactly what this is- a good old-fashioned western. The last movie I can remember being similar is Lawrence Kasdan’s 1985 film “Silverado” with Scott Glenn and Kevin Kline. Apart from launching the career of Kevin Costner, “Silverado” was built on the same loving foundation and homage to those long-ago American westerns from the 40’s and 50’s that reminded today’s audiences of what they’d been missing.
With Fuqua’s “Seven,” we’re also reminded of the fun we’ve missed. If you’re looking to revisit the classic American western story structure, Fuqua has your number.