The Magnificent Seven
The Magnificent Seven is a remake of a movie that came out in 1960, which, in turn, is a remake or retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s movie Seven Samurai. And Seven Samurai is based on a few different stories in Japanese folklore. The basic plot is that there’s an evil person who is oppressing a town. The townsfolk need help to beat him so they find someone they think can. That someone then finds six others who can or will help, some are good, some are not the best people according to the law. Those seven the townspeople hired, come back and defend the town.
Now, as for how I feel about the movie, let me start off by saying that, in my opinion, this movie is truly… magnificent. And because of this, I’m going to start with the flaws the movie has, which I don’t do very often.
The first thing that I feel is a flaw is how much swearing there is. Personally, I don’t swear and if you want to, that’s your prerogative, but when there’s quite a lot in a movie, it takes away from the movie at least a little. I mean, look at the Star Wars films, all of them have less than two instances of swearing and are beyond magnificent films. There are other ways to write a script and say things than to swear.
The other minor flaw I have with the movie is that a few of the characters aren’t given any or much depth. I realize this is hard to do in a movie about seven people, along with some other prominent characters. But I would have liked to gotten a few more of the main seven than what I did get to know about them. That being said, however, everyone in this movie played their role to a “T.” I was not bored or mad with any of the performances. There’s even an actor in the movie I didn’t know was in it, and his part drew me in as soon as I saw his first facial expression. If I had to pick a favorite character, though, it would be Vincent D’onofrio’s Jack Horne. He was hilarious when he needed to be and awesome when he needed to be.
That’s hard to do, having every single character performance be played perfectly or near perfectly. The pacing in this movie is done great, too! I was not bored at any point during this movie. There was not a single point where I felt like I wanted it to speed up or slow down to get through something or keep me in a moment for longer. Whenever I felt fatigue from it moving quickly and being somewhat intense, the right scene showed up where I could stop to just breathe. I am so glad we got a fun Western done right in today’s Hollywood.
The Magnificent Seven is definitely worth a watch and worthy of a 9.7 out of 10.
Review by Austin Clemen & Caelan Markstrom