The Magnificent Seven

Antoine Fuqua’s weakest movie since 2007’s Shooter, The Magnificent Seven follows the title characters (Denzel Washington’s Chisolm, Ethan Hawke’s Robicheaux, Chris Pratt’s Faraday, Vincent D’Onofrio’s Horne, Byung-hun Lee’s Billy, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo’s Vasquez, and Martin Sensmeier’s Red Harvest) as they agree to help a small community fight a vicious industrialist named Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard). Though it opens with some promise, The Magnificent Seven grows less and less interesting (and involving) as it progresses through a ludicrously overlong running time – with the film’s curiously deliberate pace preventing the viewer from connecting to the thin narrative or one-dimensional characters. (It’s worth noting, in terms of the latter, that none of the actors manage to create a wholeheartedly compelling or sympathetic figure, although Washington sure does come close with his haunted protagonist.) The film’s distressing failure is due almost entirely to Fuqua’s reluctance to pare down the story to its basics, with the midsection, which revolves around the title figures teaching the locals how to fight, faring especially poorly due to its heavy, heavy emphasis on repetition (ie most of this stuff could’ve been covered in a single montage rather than a solid chunk of the second act). It’s clear, too, that the movie’s final stretch suffers from a similar problem, as Fuqua and scripters Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk offer up a series of action sequences that just seem to go on forever (ie the relentless barrage of gun battles and explosions quickly grow interminable) – which, despite an appreciatively over-the-top bad-guy turn from Sarsgaard, confirms The Magnificent Seven‘s place as a seriously misguided and misbegotten remake.

** out of ****