The Magnificent Seven (2016) Review

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 load-bearing. 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 does not 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 is not replaced by anything.

Bogue Is a Businessman

Peter Sarsgaard plays Bartholomew Bogue, who is not a bandit and does not want a harvest. He wants land with gold under it, and he is buying it at a price he sets, legally, with the law on his side.

That is a significant improvement on Calvera as an antagonist for a modern audience. Calvera takes a portion and leaves enough to survive, which is a system. Bogue wants everything and has paperwork.

The opening scene establishes it precisely. He stands in a church and explains capitalism to farmers, states that God did not make this country but capital did, and then has men shoot people to demonstrate that the argument is not really an argument.

Sarsgaard plays him as physically unwell and utterly untroubled, which is a specific choice. There is no relish in him, no theatricality, and no interest in being feared. He is a man executing an acquisition.

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 is 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, which means the leader has a stake nobody else knows about.

Where it is 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 genuinely 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 has been unable to do, and the film has spent two hours making the audience genuinely uncertain whether he would.

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 are without commenting on it once.

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.

That is the part the original established and the remake executes at a scale the 1960 film could not 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, which is the rarest quality in modern action. At any moment you know which street the fighting is on, where the church is, and who is where.

The Gatling gun is the escalation and it is 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 does not 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 is not seeking justice but vengeance, which is 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, which is a genuine structural change and not simply a modernization applied to the surface of a story that somebody else had already gone and told rather better back in 1960.

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, which is precisely 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 is the correct way to acknowledge a debt, which is to save it for the last two minutes.

Should you watch The Magnificent Seven (2016)?

Yes, and it is 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.

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