The Magnificent Seven (2016) Review
8/10
A mining magnate burns a church, shoots three men in the street, and gives a farming town three weeks to accept his price for their land. A widow rides out with what money the town has and hires a warrant officer, who finds her six others.
The 8 is for a remake that understands which parts of the original were essential. The recruitment, the training, the fortification and the assault all survive, and what changes is who the seven are and what the enemy wants.
What it doesn’t have is the 1960 film’s economy. This runs over two hours, several of the seven are thin, and the emotional weight the original earned through Bronson and the village children isn’t replaced by anything.
I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to from a remake of a Western I admire as much as the 1960 original. It looks terrific, the cast is a pleasure to spend two hours with, and the last forty minutes are as good as the genre gets these days. What keeps it from climbing higher is how little it gives half the seven to do.
Bogue Is a Businessman
Peter Sarsgaard plays Bartholomew Bogue, who’s not a bandit and doesn’t want a harvest. He wants land with gold under it, and he’s buying it at a price he sets, legally, with the law on his side. That’s a significant improvement on Calvera as an antagonist for a modern audience. Calvera takes a portion and leaves enough to survive. That’s a system. Bogue wants everything and has paperwork.
The opening scene establishes it. He stands in a church and explains capitalism to farmers, states that God didn’t make this country but capital did, and then has men shoot people to show that the argument isn’t really an argument. I love that scene. It tells me everything about Bogue in five minutes, and I want him dead by the time it ends.
Sarsgaard plays him as physically unwell and utterly untroubled. That’s a deliberate choice. There’s no relish in him, no theatricality, and no interest in being feared. He’s a man executing an acquisition.
An antagonist with a legal position is harder to defeat than one with a gun, because winning the fight doesn’t resolve the situation. The film mostly dodges this, and the craft point survives the dodge. If your villain is operating within the law, your protagonists have to either break it or change it, and both choices cost them something.
Remove the relish. A villain who enjoys cruelty gives the audience permission to enjoy it too, and one who’s simply indifferent offers nothing to attach to.
State the ideology once, early, and never again. Bogue explains himself in the first five minutes and spends the rest of the film acting on it.
The Casting Is the Argument
A Black warrant officer, a Mexican outlaw, a Comanche warrior, a Korean knife fighter, an Irish gambler, a Cajun sharpshooter and a mountain man who has lived among Native people.
That’s closer to the demographic reality of the American West than any Western of the studio era, and the film mostly declines to make a speech about it. The seven work together and the frictions between them are individual instead of representative. Denzel Washington’s Chisolm is the exception and the film is right to make it one. His reason for taking the job is personal, revealed late, and connected to what Bogue did to his family. That means the leader has a stake nobody else knows about.
Where it’s heavy-handed is the two scenes that address the subject directly. A line about a Black man with a badge, a moment of hesitation from a townsman, and both are true and both feel placed.
Vincent D’Onofrio’s Jack Horne is the strangest and most interesting of the seven. A mountain man with a high voice who quotes scripture, kills with his hands, and has spent years hunting the men who scalped Native people for bounty. Nothing about him is explained and the film is better for leaving him alone.
Pratt and Hawke
Chris Pratt’s Faraday is the Steve McQueen position, the charming one who does business in the edge of frames, and Pratt is very good at exactly that.
The difference is that Faraday is a drunk and a liar and the film lets him be unreliable for an hour before he becomes useful. His card tricks and his dynamite are the same character trait applied to different materials.
Ethan Hawke’s Goodnight Robicheaux is the best-written of the seven. A Confederate sharpshooter with a reputation he can no longer live up to, who has stopped being able to fire on a person, and who leaves the night before the battle.
His return is the one beat the film earns completely.
He comes back, takes a position, and does the thing he’s been unable to do, and the film has spent two hours making the audience uncertain whether he would. That return is the reason I rate this as high as I do. Hawke plays the fear so well that I wasn’t sure he’d come back either, and when he does I’m right there with him.
His friendship with Billy Rocks is also the only relationship in the group with any history in it. The two arrive together, have an arrangement neither explains, and the film lets them be whatever the audience concludes they’re without commenting on it once.
Give one member of your ensemble a showed inability, and the climax has a question in it that no amount of action can supply. The mechanism requires him to leave. If he stays and struggles, the reader assumes he’ll manage it. If he goes, they don’t know. Let the charming one be useless first. Faraday spends an hour being a liability. That means his competence in the last act is information instead of a given. Attach a skill to a flaw so they’re the same thing. Card tricks and dynamite are both sleight of hand, and the film never says so.
The Battle Is Superb
The last forty minutes are a fortified town, a prepared field, trenches, tripwires and a plan the audience has watched being built.
The original established that setup, and the remake executes it at a scale the 1960 film couldn’t afford. Every element of the defense has been shown in advance, so when the attack comes the audience can follow the plan failing in stages.
The geography is kept clear throughout, the rarest quality in modern action. At any moment you know which street the fighting is on, where the church is, and who’s where. I appreciate that more than almost anything else in the film, because I’ve lost patience with chopped-up gunfights where nobody can tell who’s shooting whom. The Gatling gun is the escalation and it’s correctly terrifying. Bogue brings industrial machinery to a gunfight, the defense collapses in seconds, and the film makes the same point The Wild Bunch made about equipment beating skill.
What the seven have prepared for is men on horses, and what arrives is capital. Bogue doesn’t need to be brave or skilled, he needs to own a machine, and everything the film established about training farmers becomes irrelevant in about forty seconds.
Where It Falls Short
Three of the seven are functionally props. Red Harvest, Billy Rocks and Vasquez each get one characteristic and a good death, and the film has no time to give them more. The 1960 version had the same problem and solved it in the recruitment, where each man got a scene that established a temperament instead of a skill. Here the recruitment is faster and several of the seven arrive already assembled. Haley Bennett’s Emma Cullen is better served and is given a real position. She hired them, she fights, and she states plainly that she’s not seeking justice but vengeance. That’s the film’s most honest line. She also stays. The 1960 version had a village that surrendered its defenders and farmers who went back to the fields, and this one has a woman who picks up a rifle and is standing in the street at the end. That’s a real structural change, and I think it’s the best idea the remake has.
The other loss is the ending. The 1960 film closes on farmers back in the fields and a statement that only they won. This one closes on a monologue about the seven being magnificent. That’s exactly the sentiment the original refused.
It was also James Horner’s last completed score, finished before his death and delivered to the production by his collaborators, and it quotes the Bernstein theme at the very end. That’s the correct way to acknowledge a debt: save it for the last two minutes. When that theme finally arrives I get a lump in my throat, and I’d have traded the closing monologue for another minute of it.
An ensemble member who gets a good death and no life is a cost the reader feels even when they can’t name it. Better to have five people than seven props. If you can’t give everybody a want, cut the cast.
The ending is where a remake reveals what it understood. The original ended on the cost and this one ends on the compliment, and the difference is the whole distance between them.
Never close by telling the reader what the characters were. If they were magnificent, the reader worked that out, and saying so takes the conclusion away from them.
Should you watch The Magnificent Seven (2016)?
Yes, and it’s better than its reputation. A villain with an economic argument, a cast that looks like the actual West, forty minutes of superbly staged battle, and an ending that says out loud the one thing the 1960 version had the sense to leave unsaid.
The 8 is for a film I had a lot of fun with and would gladly put on again, held back by thin characters and an ending that talks too much. The battle alone is worth the time, and Sarsgaard and Hawke give it more weight than a remake usually gets. That closing speech is a cop-out, because the original trusted its audience and this one didn’t.
