Remake of classic western not so magnificent

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This article was published 23/09/2016 (3329 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While westerns are generally set in the latter half of the 19th century, they invariably tend to reflect the era in which they were made.

A whole cultural history is laid out when you examine how the singing cowboys of the 1930s gave way to the hard-bitten hombres of the post-war ’40s and ’50s, Sam Peckinpah’s Vietnam-era, ultra-violent nastiness of the late ’60s and ’70s, and so on.

Antoine Fuqua’s rendition of The Magnificent Seven is very much a film of its time.

Donald Trump might have been a fan of the 1960 original, with seven white guys (including Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen) settling the hash of a band of Mexican bandidos routinely harassing a vulnerable village.

Fuqua’s remake, scripted by Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk, actually casts a Trumpian figure as its heavy. Peter Sarsgaard plays Bartholomew Bogue, a rich, rapacious capitalist without a conscience, intent on taking over a town adjoining his mining operation by any means necessary.

When her unarmed husband is brutally dispatched after challenging Bogue, widow Emma (Haley Bennett) goes out seeking gunmen for hire to take on Bogue’s army of killers.

Her first hire is a U.S. marshal named Chisolm (Denzel Washington), whose ears prick up when Emma mentions Bogue’s name.

More recruits follow, including the good-natured, redemption-seeking gambler Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt), a legendary bayou-spawned sharpshooter named Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), his sidekick, Asian knife expert Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), squeaky-voiced mountain man Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), Mexican gunslinger Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and Native American warrior Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier).

The seven men are decidedly different from the cast of the original movie, but once the band gets together, the film pretty much follows in the template of the predecessor, with the men realizing they will only stand a chance if they train the beleaguered villagers how to defend themselves.

The actors each bring their star quality to bear, with Washington winningly stoic as the leader, Pratt turning on the goofball charm as a gambler with a child-like fascination for explosives and D’Onofrio particularly amusing as a lumbering avenger. Fuqua certainly knows how to stage an action sequence, particularly in a scene when the men come to town and clean house as a preamble to the bigger battle to come.

And yet, the movie never seems to click as it should. The ensemble never quite matches the prickly rapport of the original cast (or, for that matter, the cast of The Seven Samurai, the Akira Kurosawa film that inspired the 1960 western).

But the bigger missing component is the musical score. Anyone who saw the original won’t forget Elmer Bernstein’s grandly heroic theme music, which, more than any other component, elevated John Sturges’s cowboy movie to classic status.

Bernstein’s theme gets an end credits callback, but the work of composer Simon Franglen with contributions by the late, great James Horner is forgettable. Alas, the movie follows suit.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing