The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Pretty bad. They kept the original concept of seven guys fighting to save a town and tossed everything else. The assembled crew was so diverse that it was ridiculous. Their motivations literally boiled down to "I don't have anything better to do, so I'll fight to the death to save some town I've never heard of for a couple bucks." Plenty of crazy anachronisms, and plenty of just plain stupid stuff.
They took an interesting morality play and turned it into a generic action flick which you have to turn off your brain to enjoy, pretty much destroying the whole point of the movie.
2 spent bullet casings out of 5. Would not watch again.
Funny, I came here to say I saw the movie, and I enjoyed it, and I read this.
Keep in mind I have never seen the original, so it's a completely different story?
I've also seen Seven Samurai and recently watched The Magnificent Seven and enjoyed it. No masterpiece, but two hours of entertaining movie.
I should have clarified. When I said "the original" I meant the original version of The Magnificent Seven. The 1960 version with Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen. I know the story is based on The Seven Sumurai, but I wasn't talking about that.
It's not a completely different story, I mean you have a town being tormented by bad guys, and seven hired guns come in and take them on, but the similarity basically stops there. The characters are all different, and their motivations are different. In the original, some were shamed or have done shitty things in the past and are looking for redemption, if only in there own eyes. The rest had a code of honor that wouldn't let them stand by. It wasn't a group that included an Asian, a Mexican, an Indian, and a man of questionable mental faculty, led by a black man, all without anyone raising an eyebrow. I know, today it's politically correct to include every possible group in every possible situation, but in the 1800's it was not, and to have this group strolling down the street like it was nothing was absurd. They didn't include an openly gay man (although they did up the "subtext" between two characters), or a woman (though they did give her a lot more to do), but I guess they had to leave something for the next remake. And hey, Haley Bennett is pretty and I like breasts as much as any guy, but let's be serious. No way in hell she's running around in the old west in that dress, cleavage fully on display in every shot, and some shots specifically highlighting them. Not quite the grieving widow.
In this version, when rounding up the seven, there are even some throwaway lines to the effect that "I ain't got nothin' else to do". Seriously? That was not why these men did this. Out of boredom, or for the money.
The bad guy didn't just have a group of men, he had a fucking army. We watched probably a hundred of them die, and not a single one of them said "Fuck this, Sarsgaard ain't payin' me enough for this" and just took off? Why would all these guys, apparently every single one of them, be willing to die for some idiot? Yeah, it was the old west, and the money was good, but after watching literally dozens of your comrades die, are you really going to continue charging into this town on a horse, with a pistol, facing rifles being fired from cover? Or are you going to say "Fuck this, Sarsgaard ain't payin' me enough for this" and get the hell out of there?
Maybe it was because I knew what the outcome would be. Obviously the bad guy will lose, probably get killed but certainly be run out of town. Not all of The Seven will live; at least a few have to have heroic deaths. But I thought getting from Point A to Point B would be more entertaining and less insulting to my intelligence.
Topic: Last movie you saw? (Read 562296 times)
