Les Sept Mercenaires

Yet another remake…but the trailers for this one were at least encouraging, especially with Denzel Washington playing the lead.

I have vague memories of seeing the original The Magnificent Seven, (which is in itself a re-imagining of Seven Samurai), and I seem to remember liking it. I think 56 years is long enough of a gap to justify a remake, so I'll give them a pass on this one (although you could argue that 1980's Battle Beyond the Stars was another Seven Samurai remake). So what was it like?

Each character was steadily added to the team, they had a bonding/preparing the town montage, the bad guys showed up, they shot each other a lot, characters were killed, the film ended. Pretty much what I was expecting, and that's fine.

Personally, I love Westerns (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is one of my favourite films ever), so for me this formula really worked. Is it going to win any awards? Probably not, but the performances were good (although it might be hard to argue that Chris Pratt was acting anything other than himself, which again, is fine), it looked good, and most importantly, I was entertained.

(From my blog site: whingewood.wordpress.com)

Come on now. If you're going to re-make "The Magnificent 7" let's do it magnificently. Where was that great music? Where is the superlative cast that include Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Vladimir Sokoloff? You might argue that Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt are on a level with Brynner and McQueen, but I wouldn't. Pratt certainly has potential, but he doesn't yet have McQueen's star power. The rest are pale imitations, except perhaps for an unbelievably fat Vincent D'Onofrio who is certainly entertaining.

This is a modern re-telling. You might call it the Diversity 7. The producers threw in just about every minority you can think of – Mexican, Asian, Black, Woman. The only thing missing was a "little" person .

Personally I liked the idea of the woman, played very well by Haley Bennett who has been with Washington before ("The Equalizer").

An action film like this works only when the villain is villainous. Eli Wallach was terrific. Peter Sarsgaard wouldn't scare a fly.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed it. It's OK, but it's not magnificent.

My only critique is with the Emma character. She's supposedly a pioneering woman...tough no-nonsense. But her dress says otherwise. Off the shoulder, low cut? Not the reality of the day at that time. If y'all wanted sexy keep it authentic...not contrived out of Hollywood!

You sit down, ready for an old-school, sweat-soaked, gunpowder-packed western, and instead, you're greeted with a team of mercenaries that looks more like the cast of Fortnite than the Wild West. Denzel Washington as a Black cowboy hired by an entire town without a single racist redneck raising an eyebrow, a perfectly diverse set of characters, and even an Indigenous warrior who's not a walking stereotype. At this point, it's less of a western and more like an illustrated brochure from the UN.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for representation, but these historical inaccuracies hurt. These are characters who, historically, would probably be at each other's throats. Instead, they're cooperating like it's a special Dora the Explorer western edition. A bit of casual racism is thrown at a few Asian characters to tick a box, but otherwise, everything's running as smoothly as a community picnic. The historical realism here has about the same credibility as Greta Thunberg giving a keynote speech at an oil industry convention.

Luckily, the cast itself is rock solid. Denzel Washington? Still the king. The man could play a scarecrow and radiate charisma. Chris Pratt does his usual jokester routine, and surprisingly, it works. Vincent D'Onofrio plays a gruff giant with a smoker's rasp that'll make you crave straight whiskey. Honestly, the actors carry the film, and they don't disappoint.

The plot? Simple: bad guys show up, terrorize the town, and our seven mercenaries come in to light them up. It's a basic premise, and that's okay. Antoine Fuqua isn't trying to reinvent the wheel, and that's actually refreshing. Sometimes a western just needs guns, horses, and a final standoff to work. The structure is classic: gather the team, prepare for battle, and end with a grand, chaotic shootout. It's clean, efficient, and it smells of gunpowder.

Let's be honest: no one came to this movie looking for a deep narrative or Oscar-winning writing. We wanted epic gunfights, burning saloons, and bad guys dropping like bowling pins. And on that front, the film delivers. The final showdown is a beautifully orchestrated mess of whistling bullets, galloping horses, and bodies hitting the dirt like a Red Dead Redemption heist gone horribly wrong.

The Magnificent Seven is like a big, greasy hamburger: it doesn't innovate, but it satisfies your craving for action. Don't go searching for moral depth or a profound lesson. If you want a modern western that sticks to the basics and entertains, you're good to go. But if you're a John Wayne purist, be prepared to grit your teeth.

The concept of "Seven Samurai" is so simple that it's hard to believe it took half a century for a director to come up with the mission-team trope. But that's why Akira Kurosawa was such a genius, he made the seminal action movie and it worked so well that it didn't take much for its Western remake to become a classic on its own merits. The ingredients are simple and so is the structure: poor people oppressed by a corrupt and powerful man, the recruiting of the seven, the bonding with the villagers which is the meat of the story, then the climactic battle where four of the seven meet their demise. The success of the film depends on how each of these segments are handled and how the cast manages to transcend the material by making us relate to each player or enjoy their presence and interactions.

But it's not as easy as it sounds, the original was a three-hour epic with a clear three-act structure, not only we could identify each Samurai but each death resonated as a mini-tragedy. "The Magnificent Seven", less epic but as entertaining, managed to make at least five of them pretty endearing in a briefer lapse of time. Now, the problem with Antoine Fuqua's 2016 remake is that it's obviously admiring the original material and does the best to duplicate its magic, but it never seems to take its own characters seriously enough, not the magnificent, not the villagers, so why should we care? As expected, each of the seven embodies a particular trait, Denzel Washington is Sam Chisolm, the Ace, his establishing moment consists on the 'permanent' arrest of a wanted criminal and a few collateral damages. The scene works but it's so reminiscent of one of King Schultz' deeds in "Django Unchained" that it's instantly forgettable. Chris Pratt is the cool one, who enjoys a magic card trick or two and spends half his time delivering a wisecrack. Individually, they're good but together, they're no Brynner and McQueen.

Now, I waited for the taciturn one, the third Samurai/James Coburn type. He's a knife thrower played by Byung-Hun Lee, this is an interesting fellow that deserved a more ominous introduction, but as soon as we're finished admiring his skills, we discover that he's only the sidekick of a more legendary sharpshooter named Goodnight Robicheaux and played by Ethan Hawke. Hawke plays the third more three-dimensional member of the seven but I didn't like the way he stole Billy's thunder, relegated to one simple skill.

And depth would be a luxury for the other magnificent, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo is a Mexican outlaw who's given a chance by Sam and spends the rest of the time exchanging a few racist quips with Pratt, Vincent D'Onofrio is a religious tracker whose voice is the closest thing to comedy relief, and then there's Martin Sensmeier as an exiled Comanche warrior. They're all colorful and ethnically marked but that's not saying much, the Native is defined by his ability to throw arrows, the knife thrower throws knives the religious nutcase speaks to the Lord, the Mexican is... Mexican.

The only oneswho benefit from an extra pinch of depth are Hawke whose troubled actions seem to recall some PTSD shock from the Civil War and Pratt, and Washington. But if you're looking for counterparts to the magnificent seven, don't bother. I didn't expect one but I wish they could have improved the seventh one and made him as a scene stealer as Mifune, but the film didn't even manage to be better than "Young Guns", and I loved "Young Guns", the film had six protagonists and they were not as expendable as the so-called magnificent.

This version with Antoine Fuqua is obviously driven by good intentions and the fact that he decided to make a multi-ethnic cast could have given a special texture, but Fuqua also goes for the female heroine trend, and Haley Bennett (the toughest one from the village) is just so bad-ass she overshadows many of the seven. If Fuqua wanted something original, he could have made her the seventh one. It wouldn't have been the least realistic thing about the film, the introduction of the villain had almost killed any attempt to take it seriously.

They say a film is as good as its villain, on the basis of Bartholomew Bogue, the film should have been great. Peter Saargard revisits a form of old-fashioned mustached villain that is not uninteresting. That said, I can believe any form of evil exploitation, of throwing people off their land, but that a man would be shot in cold blood in front of witnesses, and a woman being axed from behind and the Marshall, no matter how corrupt he is, would do nothing about it, that's too much. If evil doesn't have standards, then the conception of heroism turns into something 'superhero' binary that doesn't really prompt us to root for anyone, since there's no intellectual challenge.

But Haley Bennett as the seventh one would've been a challenging twist, but there were more shots on her cleavage than any scenes involving the last three seven put together so I wondered whether her presence was meant to arouse the male audience or to inspire the female one. But the film leaves a little to care about, especially the villagers who're not given enough screen-time or interactions anyway. And since the timing between the entrance and the battle doesn't exceed forty minutes, we couldn't care less about the outcome. What lacked in the film is a transition between the introduction and the battle, the fact that many deaths left me cold was indicating of how the film was so reliant on the concept that it forgot to tell a genuinely powerful story, it's just about archetypes colliding into each other in a muck of cinematic conventions. It's fun and entertaining at moments, but the rest of the time, I was scratching my head with perplexity.