Where’s the justice?
A classic 1960s western gets a slick makeover, but the violence is sanitised.
As I walked out of this slick remake of the classic 1960 western, two things were worrying me. First, had The Magnificent Seven passed the “No animals harmed” certificate from the American Humane Association? Its gun-battle ending is nothing short of equine apocalypse, with appaloosas doing Immelmanns and thoroughbreds cartwheeling across the screen, launched by powerful munitions. It more closely resembled a Top Gun dogfight than True Grit. Never mind their riders. All that whinnying can’t be a good sign.
My second worry was for the state of Peter Sarsgaard’s teeth, what with all the scenery-chewing he does, gleefully gnawing at his hammy villain role. He plays Bartholomew Bogue, a demigod of cruel frontier hyper-capitalism, holding the town of River Creek under his spurred boot while he scoops their mines for gold. We know he’s pure evil, a real no-gooder, because he inflicts a grandiose monologue on a sweating child in the film’s pre-title sequence.
This just won’t do, thinks Emma (Haley Bennett). She’s had about enough of these speeches as we have, so she employs Denzel Washington and a collection of dusty misfits, abruptly introduced, to take back the town. Chris Pratt is the first to sign up, rehashing his cocky-cowboy act from Jurassic World. Ethan Hawke
is a sharpshooter prone to structurally convenient bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder. Vincent D’Onofrio is doing Orson Welles on industrial-sized doses of helium, and Martin Sensmeier plays a Comanche warrior with – in case we were doubting his affiliation – stars and stripes painted on his face. Justice will be served.
Because this is an updated American western (which, by the way, escapes all comparison with its predecessor or Seven Samurai), justice requires an exhausting display of sanitised violence. The Alamostyle showdown seems to last about 15 hours, and none of it hits us in the gut, which it ought to. Our supposedly “magnificent” seven are mere desperados who lack backstories and empathetic attributes. We’re supposed to feel buoyed by their humanitarian intervention, yet all I could think about was the catapulted horses strewn around the place.
Is there nothing going on beneath these hollow ricochets? Director Antoine Fuqua has compared Bogue’s control of River Creek to “terrorism”, although he clearly missed the irony of killing off a main character with a heroically portrayed suicide bombing. No, even that’s not worth a fistful of dollars.
IN CINEMAS NOW
We know he’s a real no-gooder, because he inflicts a grandiose monologue on a sweating child in the pre-title sequence.