Denzel is the man!
The western genre has long been one of my favourites. A quintessential American genre, it thrives on simplicity. From the John Ford films to Leone to Eastwood, the genre, no matter how classical or revisionist, comes down to good guys versus bad guys. The western hero is a particular archetype — the wandering loner who has little to say but has a deep and sordid history. His comrades are usually a dynamic bunch with conflicting personalities and the villain is a sadistic landowner or public enforcer who preys on the weak. This sums up Antoine Fuqua’s remake of The Magnificent Seven, an actual remake that honours the legacy of what came before.
This is a good film. It plays by the rules of the western, follows a typical structure and ends with a gun fight. Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington) is hired by the locals of a mining town to rid them of the evil baron Sam Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard). He enlists a charismatic rogue (Chris Pratt), a sharpshooter and his asian sidekick (Ethan Hawke and Byung-hun Lee), a wanted Mexican (Manuel Garcia Rulfo), a Comanche Warrior (Martin Sensmeier) and a religious mountain man ( Vincent D’Onofrio) to help him. The cast is a dream. Too bad the focus is really on Washington, Pratt and Hawke, the major stars of the piece. The rest of them are there to chew scenery but I guess in a film with so many characters, some would get lost in the shuffle. The show really does belongs to Denzel, who saunters through this like a pro. I’d watch him in another western is a second.
Fuqua, who is at home in the urban jungle (Training Day, Olympus has Fallen) proves to be quite good at staging western style action. His camera captures wonderful western landscapes while also kinetically placing us into a few well constructed action sequences. This is a fine film that should please anyone looking for an entertaining night out.
The Magnificent Seven is a good western.
