And they said the Western was dead. But if anything can bring a genre back to life, it’s a killer cast. It happened with True Grit. It happened with Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. And after seeing the first trailer for The Magnificent Seven, we think it’ll happen again.
Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke -- the names burst out like a round of bullets from a gatling gun. This Magnificent Seven is a remake of John Sturges’ classic from 1960, which itself was a remake of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. It’s updated and looks shiny, but the story is still as old as the hills.
Watch the trailer here
It would’ve been very easy for this movie to be ironic and meta - the Western is, after all, a dying genre. But from the looks of it, this movie is fully embracing the tropes. Yes, there’s a scenery-chewing villain and yes there’s a lonesome drifter. But it’s 2016 now, and we’ve seen Blazing Saddles and Django Unchained. So it’s finally OK to have a black man leading a Western. And we’ll probably never get a Red Dead Redemption movie, but for fans of that video game, there’s a lot to love here.
{{/usCountry}}It would’ve been very easy for this movie to be ironic and meta - the Western is, after all, a dying genre. But from the looks of it, this movie is fully embracing the tropes. Yes, there’s a scenery-chewing villain and yes there’s a lonesome drifter. But it’s 2016 now, and we’ve seen Blazing Saddles and Django Unchained. So it’s finally OK to have a black man leading a Western. And we’ll probably never get a Red Dead Redemption movie, but for fans of that video game, there’s a lot to love here.
{{/usCountry}}The movie is co-written by Nic Pizzolato, who you may know as the writer of the hit HBO show True Detective. It’s directed by Antoine Fuqua, who led Denzel to an Oscar in Training Day and worked with him again on The Equalizer. Here, he’s playing up to his action strengths. Like we said, with talent like this, both in front of and behind the camera, it’s tough to go wrong.
The Magnificent Seven also stars Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Byung-Hun, Matt Bomer and Peter Sarsgaard. It arrives in theatres on September 23.
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