The only reason
I decided to go see this movie was because Denzel Washington starred in it.
Having seen Seven
Samurai (1954), which is a good movie, I couldn’t imagine what
Fuqua was going to make out of the age-old classic. After seeing this movie, I
can comfortably say he made nothing out of an already written script that just
needed a modern touch to make it memorable. When you’re done seeing this movie,
everything about it is left behind on the theater seat, as it had no memorable
moments or characters to hold on to.
Denzel
Washington did his part, as did the rest of the cast—Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke,
Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Byung-hun, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Martin Sensmeier—to
make this movie enjoyable. But in the end, it seems they enjoyed themselves
more making this movie than I did watching it.
Their enthusiasm
and energy were exciting enough to keep me wanting to see how the movie would
end. With that in mind, for a movie based on a 1960 remake of the same name,
which in turn is based on the Japanese film Seven
Samurai (1954), director Antoine Fuqua [Olympus
Has Fallen (2013) and The
Equalizer (2014)] wasted much of our time assembling the seven-man
crew. That was the same problem I had with the original Japanese film.
More than half
of the movie is just talk about the oncoming battle to save the town, but to be
honest, the battle was worth seeing. It was fun to watch how the men put their
lives on the line to win the fight.
The movie is
more than two hours long, and I believe a shorter version would have made it
much better.
The movie plot
is very similar to its predecessors on which it’s based. Here, Sam (Denzel
Washington) is approached by a pair of threatened homeowners for help. Their
town is being overrun by an industrialist named Bogue. One of the pair, Emma,
saw her husband and a group of her townspeople murdered by Bogue’s men as they
tried to stand up to him.
She and a friend
approach Sam with all the money the town has to come save them.
Sam agrees to help and goes about recruiting as many gunslingers as he knows or
comes across to follow him on this quest, which will likely lead to their
deaths.
He assembles a
group of seven, and they train as many townspeople as they can to carry arms
and prepare for the fight against Bogue.
The movie is a
massacre of lives and isn’t worth the trip I took to go see it.
0 comments:
Post a Comment