Magnificent Seven [Review]
As we enter the period after the Summer blockbusters season, exciting films are becoming farther apart. Magnificent Seven stuck out to me in the trailer reels as something that could be fun, exciting, and sweet sweet mind candy.
Westerns have never really needed a complicated plot. As Magnificent Seven goes, you got your small mining town with its inhabitants’ way of life being threatened by an industrialist. After a few of the people are killed for trying to stand up to him the wife of one of the killed seeks out someone who can fight to take their home back. Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) finds Chisolm (Denzel Washington) a warrant officer as after a successful outing and persuades him to take the job. They are joined by Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt), a gambler who Chilsolm recently made acquaintance. They go in search of a more help and fill the roster with a tracker (Vincent D’Onofrio), a sharp shooter (Ethan Hawke) along with a few other rough riders.
As they arrive at the town, it’s a fun introduction of how this group both outsmarts and out skills their enemy. They all have their own individual talents that make them fun to watch, however in a movie that spends what felt like half the film in gun fights, even the variety of stunts they presented began to lose their power. Of course they learn that the townspeople are all farmers, women and children and not fighters. They spend the next week training who ever is able to fight and working out a plan to take on the outnumbering force that is coming. We get some fun character moments, what with Hawke showing how sharp of a shooter he really is and Chris Pratt being his always charming self.
Even as the film builds up to it’s final climax in the battle for Rose Creek, the action while fun just never felt like it hit the high it was going for. Much of it felt predictable and by the numbers. I think that one of the main problems is that none of the opposing gunmen had any investment, they were all just faceless guns for hire for our heroes to shoot and blow up. Even the Bogue, the industrialist big bad of the film had no development or attachment aside from killing Emma’s husband in the first five minutes till the very end when it’s revealed he had a history with Chilsom. While this could have been built up by revealing this earlier, it felt more like a side note in an attempt to give more stakes to an already decided fight.
Maybe it is a good thing that Magnificent Seven wasn’t in the summer season of blockbusters, as it ended up being more of a moderate build with a lackluster conclusion that didn’t meet the explosive expectations given by the trailers. While the cast was strong and had entertaining moments, the story and its characters never rose above a predictable cookie cutter formula.
3 out of 5
