Denzel Washington (Training Day) and Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) may have converted me into a westerns fan with The Magnificent Seven. Not to say Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy), Ethan Hawke (Training Day), and everyone else in the film didn't do a good job. They did great! It's just, having Washington star in the film made the difference between this being a must-see in the theater for me instead of a maybe on Netflix. Westerns just aren't my thing. But today I learned The Magnificent Seven is absolutely my thing!!
Let's start with the diversity of the seven men who come in to save this town! Four of the seven are minorities. Washington plays the leader of the group, Chisolm. Byung-hun Lee (G.I. Joe) plays Billy Rocks, a sidekick of sorts (that really can hold his own alone and does at one point) to Hawke's character Goodnight Robicheaux. He is actually much more than a sidekick, only being a sidekick in that he joined the group because Goodnight Robicheaux (Hawke) would not join without him. Then there's Vasquez, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (Cake). And finally, there's Red Harvest, played by Martin Sensmeier (Salem), who is of Tlingit, Koyukon-Athabascan, and Irish descent. Other than Washington, they don't say as much as the other three, but their presence is known and felt. Billy Rocks can shoot a rifle, but his forte is slinging knives. Red Harvest shows off his bow and arrow skills, and though he speaks Comanche with Chisolm, later they discover he speaks English too. Not only do Vasquez, Red Harvest, and Chisolm share the talent of being bi-lingual, they are also the sole survivors of the seven! I went in expecting them all to survive, but I must say the last thing I was expecting was for the Black man, Native American, and Mexican to be the sole survivors of the group. It left me pleasantly surprised!
Washington gave us classic Washington, and as always I loved it! Pratt gave us a glimmer of comedic Pratt. Just enough for comic relief without turning the Western into a comedy. It was just right, as was the comic relief Jack Horne (Vincent D'Onofrio, Law and Order) brought to the film. D'Onofrio is given the perfect character in Jack Horne, because no one plays a beat-to-your-own-drum character like D'Onofrio! Hawke's character, Goodnight Robicheaux, had one of the more interesting character developments. You'll go from questioning if he is who he says he is, to watching him abandon the other seven, to seeing him help save the town. On top of that, he is haunted by his past in the Civil War (or as they call it in the film, the War of Northern Aggression). It seems he fought on the Confederate side, and all the killings he's famous for have actually traumatized him to the point where he finds it hard to shoot to kill. But he's not the only one with an interesting past. Chisolm wasn't sure he would stay to help the town fight off the bad guys trying to take their land from them, but then he found out the leader was Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard, Jarhead). Towards the end of the film we learn Bogue and his men did a similar thing to a town Chisolm lived in with his family, and Bogue's men raped Chisolm's mother, murdered his sisters, and hung Chisolm (he reveals the rope burn on his neck)!!
Now, it's a western. So the key to a good western is the climactic fight scene (or so I assume, lol). And it was perfect!! Who needs a Marvel film in IMAX 3D?! The shots were great and varied. The tempo and pace kept you enthralled in the fight sequences, with great help from the accompanying musical score. With seven characters to follow, and a variety of weaponry and fight styles, the pace appropriately varied as it shifted from the different scenes in the fight sequence. On a related note, two nice surprises were how they worked in having Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett, The Equalizer) be one of the shooters and having Red Harvest take down the Native American who was one of Bogue's men. And Bogue's death scene was perfect for the ultimate pure justice for the two people who were severely impacted by Bogue and his men!
I'm not a westerns fan, but there are no complaints from me. It was a great movie and I highly recommend you go see it!
9/10