Whenever there is a critics’ poll of the greatest movies ever made, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) is always near the top of the list. (The most recent survey of punters’ faves that I saw had the preposterous Mulholland Drive at #1 – gawd help us!). Hollywood eventually had a crack at re-working Kurosawa’s classic for an American audience with John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960), coming up with Elmer Bernstein’s mighty theme music along the way. Cretin though I might be, I prefer Sturges’s film – possibly because it’s in English, with colour and the inestimable presence of Steve McQueen. Another take on it was released in 1972 and in 1998 there came a version which, compared to the first M7, was akin to putting a boy band up against the ‘Sticky Fingers’ Rolling Stones. Which is to say that it has been downhill for the story since its glory days, and now director Antoine Fuqua has hit rock bottom. The town of Rose Creek – in the US, not Mexico – is under the thumb of the unscrupulous Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard). Like so many lone riders of the Wild West (Cheyenne, Bronco, Sugarfoot), Chisolm (Denzel Washington) turns up to liberate its downtrodden inhabitants, although he is not so much the hired gun with a conscience fighting for the poor as a man harbouring personal issues that he needs to resolve with Bogue. As the convener of his crew of outsiders, Chisolm is dressed all in black, but without the elegance of Yul Brynner’s original leader of the pack.
Bending over backwards to embrace cultural and racial diversity, Fuqua has given us a sort of Folies Bergère posse that includes Byung-hun Lee’s Chinaman with a knife and Martin Sensmeier as the Indian who really does give cliché a bad name. Emma (Haley Bennett) is the girl who inspires their high moral dudgeon, and she has the cleavage that neither Kurosawa nor Sturges felt obliged to exploit.
It’s rubbish, but appropriate for the Trump era that we may be entering.
