Magnificent Seven has its star power, but uneven
The 41st Toronto International Film Festival opened Sept. 8, with a gala screening of Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven, a remake of the 1960 western, itself based on Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. It’s a safe choice: a world premiere set to open in just two weeks, and featuring a popular cast topped by Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt.
But like the recent remake of the epic Ben- Hur, The Magnificent Seven doesn’t reinvent the (wagon) wheel. The explosions are bigger, the fights fightier, and Peter Sarsgaard makes a suitably sinister villain as a land baron trying to get his hands on the mineral-rich town of Rose Creek. But the secondary characters are thinly written — call it The Magnificent Two and the So-So Five — and the action scenes are choppily shot and edited, to the point where it’s sometimes hard to tell where everyone is.
Here are f i ve t hings we learned from the press conference:
1. Washington has never seen the original Magnificent Seven.
“It allowed me to do what I wanted to do, and not try not to do what somebody else did,” he said. The entire cast did sit down to watch movies together during filming, however. They included The Seven Samurai, The Wild Bunch and, if Pratt can be believed, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, Frozen and Wayne’s World 2.
2. Weapons training starts with the basics.
All the actors went through gun training, but when Martin Sensmeier, who plays a Comanche warrior, was asked for advice on how to handle a tomahawk, he was succinct. “Put it down. Leave it where you found it.”
3. Friendly rivals.
Ethan Hawke and ByungHun Lee developed a complicated on- set rapport to match the relationship between their characters. But it was nothing compared to the reaction of Lee’s wife, who adored Hawke. “I’ ve been hanging out with her for 10 years,” said Lee. “I’ve never seen her that happy.”
4. Pratt and Manuel Garcia- Rulfo were similarly inseparable.
“We were naturally competitive with each other,” said Pratt. But he sounded like an excited moviegoer when he spoke of watching GarcieRulfo “using that skill while being a savage killer. That was cool, man!”
5. Pratt can get serious.
Asked about playing an outlaw in Guardians of the Galaxy and now The Magnificent Seven, he allowed that the former was a far lighter role. “This is a person who suffers the regret of having sinned in his life,” he said of his role in the western. “When you think you’re a bad guy you let yourself do bad things.”