When asked to find a good remake, most would turn to the occasional cross-cultural remakes or classics that no one remembers the original version of. This 2016 emissary of a wounded genre takes a new spin on a story that had already been retold and manages to pull it off with style.
As most people know, a couple of the best westerns of the genre's golden era were adaptations of samurai films that translate the essential story into a cowboy aesthetic. Perhaps the most famous of those was John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven, a reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa's brilliant Seven Samurai. 56 years later, the story hit the big screen yet again, with the creative vision of a fan to steer it in the right direction.
2016's The Magnificent Seven was helmed by acclaimed director Antoine Fuqua. Fuqua is a long-time fan of the western genre, and of Kurosawa's filmography, who approached the project with a level of reverence. The director would have been best known at the time for Training Day, Shooter, or Olympus has Fallen, and many of the film's cast joined the project to work with him. The early work on the film began around 2012, with a radically different cast than the one that made it to the screen. Fuqua was careful to incorporate a diverse cast, citing the fact that an all-white group of cowboys would fly afoul of any sense of historical accuracy. Fuqua's directorial eye is one of the most important elements of the film, the fact that he understands what makes the previous films good is on display in every frame.
The plot of The Magnificent Seven is largely unchanged from the film that inspired it, or indeed, the film that inspired that one. In the aftermath of the Civil War, a monstrous robber baron called Bartholomew Bogue leads an army of mercenaries to take over a small town. He enslaves the town's residents and threatens any who oppose him with murder, leading a strong-willed woman to seek out the help of bounty hunters to free her neighbors. From there, it's a cross-country quest to gather up a team of hardened warriors and do battle against impossible odds to free the innocent from the tyrannical. It's a blisteringly simple overarching plot, but the characters each have their own motivations and conflicting personalities that make them interesting to watch.
The element of the film that most already know is that the cast is largely spectacular, and that is absolutely correct. Denzel Washington takes the lead role, US Marshall turned bounty hunter Sam Chisolm, and he's pitch-perfect as the group's leader. Washington had worked with Fuqua numerous times over the years and the two are a great duo. Chris Pratt portrays Joshua Faraday, a more comedic figure who takes Star-Lord's gimmick and puts it in a more natural location. Vincent D'Onofrio takes the role of mountain man Jack Horne, who is as intimidating as he is endearing.
Ethan Hawke turns in a dynamic performance as Goodnight Robicheaux, a PTSD-riddled Civil War vet. He gets most of the film's most powerful acting moments, in a role that foreshadowed Hawke's role as John Brown a few years later. Byung-Hun Lee portrays assassin Billy Rocks, who manages to be unassailably cool while uttering less than a paragraph of dialogue. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo is the dangerous outlaw Vasquez, who has some of the best comic exchanges of the film. Martin Sensmeier portrays the taciturn Comanche warrior Red Harvest with an excellent performance, though half of it is delivered in a foreign language. With Peter Sarsgaard in the villain role and Haley Bennett gathering the team, the cast is the best part of the film.
With a fantastic cast and solid action direction, The Magnificent Seven delivers in all of the major ways fans were hoping for. Modern action filmmaking is the main way in which the 2016 film innovates from its predecessors. The shootouts are a ton of fun, making the most out of the casts' many unique gimmicks. Westerns are a lot less common in the modern era, at least without the gimmick of setting them in space, making The Magnificent Seven stand out against its peers. Reviews at the time were mixed, some citing it as a return to form for the ailing genre, while others called it a misfire. The film doesn't reinvent the western genre, but that's not what it set out to do. It's an escalation of a story that has seen two eras of filmmaking before it.
The Magnificent Seven is the kind of story that can work in almost any era. Fans have seen the classic samurai version, the classic western version, and the modern take earns its place in the pantheon. It's not better than the films that came before it, but The Magnificent Seven takes a new turn on an old tale to great success.