The Magnificent Seven

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Looking to mine for gold, greedy industrialist Bartholomew Bogue seizes control of the Old West town of Rose Creek

Denzel Washington looks just right high in the saddle, which makes sense given that he’s become our John Wayne — our point-and-shoot savior. It’s a funny business being a hero these days, and Mr. Washington has the résumé to prove it, with characters — a corrupt cop, a drug kingpin — that would have been unthinkable for Wayne, who saved the day when the lines between right and wrong were more rigidly defined. Those lines have blurred, of course, and good guys went sort of bad and sometimes very bad, partly because we like it like that. (It feels so good.)

Mr. Washington’s latest, “The Magnificent Seven,” is a remake of a remake that’s as fresh as recycled recycling suggests. Its principal source is the 1960 film of the same title about a septet of hired American guns protecting a Mexican village. In that film Yul Brynner played the prowling avenger and real cool cat who assembles a team that includes a blade-thin James Coburn and Steve McQueen, whose beauty had not yet hardened. Directed by John Sturges, the film is an easy, meandering male weepy, best enjoyed for its macho posturing and Elmer Bernstein score; less memorable are its Mexican clichés, even if Eli Wallach’s mustache-twirler delivers a defibrillator punch.

The font of all this mock magnificence is Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” a version of which was released in the United States in 1956 as “The Magnificent Seven” (with an hour chopped). In his review, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times compared it to “High Noon,” calling it “a solid, naturalistic, he-man outdoor action film, wherein the qualities of human strength and weakness are discovered in a crisis taut with peril.” Mr. Crowther noted that its story was malleable enough that “it could be transposed without surrendering a basic element to the nineteenth century and a town on our own frontier.” From his pen to some Hollywood executive’s ear.

And so once more onto the saddle — again! This time, the seven are riding — and shooting — under the adequate if unremarkable direction of Antoine Fuqua. Working with truckloads of dust and high-contrast cinematography that tends to turn shadows into bottomless inky blots, Mr. Fuqua approaches the western like an ardent fan, leaving no genre element untouched, from gun spinning to trick riding to atmospherically flapping dusters. The story — the script is credited to Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk — pretty much follows the line of the 1960 film, with some tweaks that speak to contemporary mores, including a gun-toting frontierswoman, Emma (Haley Bennett).

She’s sassy, but some messes a gal can’t clean up alone, so she hires the gunslingers, beginning with Mr. Washington’s bounty hunter, Chisolm. She wants to rid her town of its own mustache-twirler, Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), a trigger-happy dandy with a devilish goatee, an embroidered vest and hordes of help. He and his gang are terrorizing an American town, which has the bad fortune of being next to a mine he’s plundering. Emma makes her pitch to Chisolm while he stares down at her from horseback. He casually asks if she’s after revenge. “I seek righteousness,” she replies, “but I’ll take revenge,” an exchange that affirms the story’s bloody course.

The new movie is as moth-eaten as the serapes strewn through the 1960 film, but there’s no denying the appeal of the image of Mr. Washington riding a horse, shooting a Colt and leading a posse of vigilantes to save a mostly white Western town. Mr. Washington is, to state the overobvious, a great star, which means that he has that ineluctable what’s-it for selling the goods no matter what their sell-by date. And he has nice help in his amusing backup team, which is divided between parading peacocks (Chris Pratt, Vincent D’Onofrio and Mr. Sarsgaard) and slinking foxes (Ethan Hawke, Lee Byung-hun and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), who steal gnawed-off bits and pieces of the movie.

Mr. Washington’s hero — because he’s a black man and especially a black man in a genre historically defined by white men routing nonwhite men — is inherently more complex than Brynner’s was. That could have been enough to justify this remake, so it’s too bad that Chisolm has been given a rationale for his actions. The 1960 film never really explains why Brynner’s character helps the villagers, which suggests that he doesn’t need a reason to do good, he just does it, a silence that suggests a code, however fraudulent. Chisolm, by contrast, has his sights set on vengeance, which means that his deeds are strictly a matter of self-interest. That’s pretty grim, but also very now.

“The Magnificent Seven” is rated PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned) for relentless gun violence. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes.

SOURCE: goo.gl/wjpTX3