The Magnificent Seven

Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven is a remake of John Sturges Spaghetti Western of the same name (1960), which itself is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s acclaimed Seven Samurai (1954), not unlike Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), a remake of Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), which was a remake of another Kurosawa film, Yojimbo (1961), Corbucci being Tarantino’s favourite director in the Spaghetti Western genre.

The cast is well selected, Denzel Washington filling Yul Brynner and Takashi Shimura’s role as the leader of the team, and the ever-charming Chris Pratt as his second. All actors are invested in their roles. The Seven meet the characters that recur from film to film, and are also easier to tell apart with their varying costumes and looks, though admittedly it may help that the Seven are cast with a degree of ethnic diversity in mind. The villain is a bit one-dimensional as a character, even displaying how evil he is with the ol’ “shooting the messenger” cliché. The plot is more or less the same as Sturges’ version; Fuqua even mimics scenes that Sturges mimicked from Kurosawa. As is typical with most remakes, it repeats some of the more iconic or effective lines from the 1960 version, though it does manage to avoid the quotes sounding corny. The action is gritty, tense, explosive, and tries out some new ideas.

Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven remake is honestly no better than Sturges’ version and definitely not up to the same standard as Seven Samurai, but at the same time it’s not an unfaithful adaptation. The acting is crisp, the characters are defined and discernable, the tone and visual style fits the genre, and (whether to its merit or detriment) the plot is virtually identical to the other films. It is by no means a bad remake – rather, it is simply another version.