Film

“oK. Everybody make a tough guy face for the camera and say, ‘bullets!’”

Western union

Director Antoine Fuqua’s remake of The Magnificent Seven, which was itself a remake of Seven Samurai, has enough in common with the Yul Brynner/Steve McQueen film to make it feel like a retelling of the classic story. It also contains enough departures to make it feel like a fresh take rather than just a rehash.

The Mexican bandits led by Eli Wallach are replaced by an evil, land-stealing company led by Bartholomew Bogue. As played by Peter Sarsgaard, Bogue is a memorable villain who makes the skin crawl. He rolls into a mining town, kills a bunch of good hard-working people, and winds up getting the group in the movie’s title on his ass. Let the spectacular gunfights commence!

Fuqua’s pal Denzel Washington—they did The Equalizer and Training Day together—is first rate as Chisolm, basically Brynner’s role from the 1960 classic. When the wife of one of the deceased (Haley Bennett) comes looking for help and mentioning Bogue’s name, Chisolm flies into calm, collected and most certainly valiant action. He enlists six other men to visit the town and prepare the townspeople for the fight of their lives.

The Magnificent Seven include Chisolm, scheming alcoholic gunslinger Faraday (Chris Pratt), the knife-wielding Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), the Confederate sharpshooter Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), mountain man Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), Vasquez the “Texican” (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), as Faraday coins him, and Comanche Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier).

Each member of the cast does a nice job building his character in the just-over-two-hour film. Hawke, who also frequents Fuqua films, is especially good as the once heartless sharpshooter who now has a case of the Jon Voight-inDeliverance shakes when he tries to kill a living

thing. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it here again: Hawke is the most improved actor I’ve witnessed in my years of reviewing movies. This guy used to be the worst thing on a movie screen, and now he is simply one of the best. Pratt scores laughs as the slightly racist, Archie Bunker-with-a-pistol-and-a-deck-of-cards member of the crew. D’Onofrio is equally funny, sometimes employing a high-pitched voice, as a man of honorable means who will, however, crush your face with his boot if you steal from him. Fuqua knows how to stage an action scene, and the action scenes in this one are absolutely thrilling. Every gunfight is expertly staged and beautifully tense, especially the final standoff. I was reminded watching this movie that if it weren’t for that final battle in The Magnificent Seven, we wouldn’t have had those final battles in Blazing Saddles and The Three Amigos. While the film somehow scored a PG-13, it’s worth noting The Magnificent that it’s a borderline PG-13, in that it’s very violent. There are Seven not only a lot of gun deaths in this movie, but some serious 12345 stabbing and slashing with knives and forks and things. I was actuDirector: Antione Fuqua ally surprised by how brutal the Starring: Peter Sarsgaard, film was. I guess the MPAA has Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke some sort of blood volume they allow for, and a movie can stab and shoot as much as it wants as long as no more than two quarts or so of fake blood is spilled. By my eye, this sucker is an R-rated movie. If anything takes the film down a notch, it’s the all-too-clean production values. The sets often look like something out of Disney’s Frontierland, and the costuming is a little too clean and spiffy. For appearances, I prefer Westerns that are a little grittier, like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. The Magnificent Seven gets the fall movie season off to a good start. It’s actually the sort of well-cast, thrilling blockbuster we expect to see in the summer. It kicks ass on most of the so-called summer blockbuster offerings, and gives the old-time Western and remake genres a decent addition. Ω

1Blair Witch This is the second sequel to TheBlair WitchProject, the original “found footage” horror film. Would Lionsgate take this opportunity to reintroduce a once promising premise into a new style of film, perhaps a traditional narrative about the Blair Witch set in the forest without the gimmick of people running around with cameras filming themselves, even when they are in great peril? Nope—opportunity wasted. This movie is essentially the original with louder noises, a few more gizmos—drones, walkie talkies, better tents—and, yes, lots more sticks tied together with twine and piles of rocks. For those of you who are scared shitless by stick men made out of twigs and twine—and piles of rocks in front of tents—this movie will fuck your shit up. I’m thinking that accounts for perhaps .00009832 percent of the movie-going population. The rest of you will be bored out of your minds. James (James Allen McCune), long suffering brother of the original film’s Heather, who vanished all those years ago, has found … a tape. That tape contains shaky footage made by somebody moronic enough to try to keep the action on camera rather than focus on their much needed getaway. In said footage, a messed-up looking woman is glimpsed for a second, so James instantly thinks it’s Heather. James assembles a crew of idiots to go into the forest, the cursed forest where people disappear and strange tapes are found, in search of the house where the footage was filmed by some moron who didn’t just drop the stupid camera in favor of weaponry and get the hell to safety. The results: not scary and not entertaining.

2Don’t Breathe Three dimwits (Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto) try to rob a blind military veteran (a growly Stephen Lang) of his dough in his house. In the course of their heist, they find out a few really bad things about the guy, including his aspirations to be the next Jigsaw (the presently retired, ridiculous villain from the Sawseries). Rocky (Levy, who also starred in Alvarez’s EvilDead) wants to get out of Detroit and move to California with her little sister. She and her boyfriend (Zovatto) have been pulling off minor robberies with Alex (Minnette), using alarm codes from his dad’s security company. They get wind of a boatload of money in the blind man’s house and set out to rob him while he’s home. Yes, the premise is interesting, but things go off the rails pretty quickly when The Blind Man—that’s his actual character name—somehow survives a gassing and interrupts the robbery. His initial thwarting of the break-in is convincing enough, but then the movie becomes all about the robbers standing still while The Blind Man races right by them.

5Hell or High Water Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine and Ben Foster all destroy their parts in this absolutely terrific modern Western from director David Mackenzie. Pine and Foster play two brothers who come up with a bank-robbing scheme to save the family farm, and Bridges is the soonto-be-retired sheriff trying to stop them. Pine takes his career into all new territories with his work here, making you forget he’s Captain Kirk and totally disappearing into his part. Foster, an actor I couldn’t stand when he was younger, just gets better and better with each film, with this being his best work yet. Pine is supposedly the more sensible one, while Foster is the nut. What’s great about the writing here is how those roles sometimes switch, and the acting by both makes it mesmerizing to watch. What else can you say about Bridges at this point? He’s one of the best actors to have ever walked the Earth, and this further cements that fact. Mackenzie, whose most notorious prior film was the underrated StarredUp, takes a step into the elite class with this one. His staging of car chases and manhunts is nerve-shredding. 3 The Hollars Actor John Krasinski’s second directorial effort is a decent one with a first-rate cast. Krasinski stars as John Hollar, working a dead-end job for a publishing company when his girlfriend (the always great Anna Kendrick) informs him that his mom (a terrific Margo Martindale) is sick, and then he’s flying home to see her. Once there, John has to deal with his weird brother Ron (Sharlto Copley), the oddball nurse that is also his old girlfriend’s new husband (Charlie Day) and his weepy dad (Richard Jenkins). The script goes to some familiar territories, but the performers put new spins on the situations, especially Martindale, who takes the part and really runs with it. Krasinski does a good job handling the script’s many mood swings, and the relationships in the film feel real—that strange kind of real. The film manages to get laughs, even when the subject matter goes to dark places. It deals with the lousier side of life without getting totally depressing, something that could’ve happened easily. Krasinski makes it all work. The supporting cast also includes Randall Park, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Josh Groban in small but memorable roles. The soundtrack is stellar, featuring Josh Ritter, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, and Wilco.

4Sausage Party SausageParty, the animated hellcat from writer-producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, is the first big studio film in a long time with screaming levels of originality. It’s a profanity-laden, blasphemous middle finger to the movie-making establishment that thinks it’s OK to turn out sequels and comic book movies that suck as long as people shell out for them. It couldn’t be more fun, and it’s like nothing you’ve seen before. In a sunny supermarket, a bunch of vegetables, hot dogs and buns wake up and sing a happy song, convinced that today will be the day they are chosen by humans to enter the great beyond—the world on the other side of those automatic sliding doors. What they find on the other side of those doors is nonstop carnage, certain death, and a generally bad time for all things digestible. What makes SausagePartya cut above your average stoner movie full of food items screwing and being murdered is that it’s actually a smart swipe at organized religion and politics.

3Sully Historical accuracy be damned in Sully, Clint Eastwood’s take on the heroic actions of pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who landed his plane on the Hudson River and saved the lives of all crew and passengers on board. The passages about a pilot successfully landing his plane in an ice-cold Hudson River and allowing over 150 people to tell the tale, live long and prosper are really the most important, and most compelling, parts of this movie. As for the evil, fictitious inquisition that basically tortures Sully (played by Tom Hanks in a typically riveting performance) and co-pilot Jeff Skiles (welcome back to decent movies, Aaron Eckhart!), well, that’s basically a lot of made-up horseshit. That’s not to say Sully wasn’t tormented and obsessed in the days after the event, and the film does a good job displaying his internal struggles. The man had to land a plane after a bunch of birds flew into his engines, and then he probably did have a bunch of dicks asking him too many questions in the aftermath. Undoubtedly, he went through hell during that flight and is haunted until this day. Eastwood and Hanks deliver a compelling psychological drama about a man who doubts his own heroism, to the point of nightmarish visions and self deprecation. Where the film goes a bit afoul is the depiction of a panel that didn’t even give Sully and his crew a chance to breathe after being plucked out of the Hudson. Yes, there was an inquiry, but it took place many months later, not a few days after the event.