Antoine Fuqua’s remake of John Sturges’s 1960 western stirs up the racial mix of the seven gunfighters a little. Leading the team is Denzel Washington’s cool-headed Chisholm; he is backed up by, among others, the South Korean actor Byung-hun Lee playing the knife specialist Billy Rocks; Manuel Garcia-Rulfo stars as the Mexican bad boy Vasquez and the Native American actor Martin Sensmeier, rather underserved in the way of dialogue, as the Comanche warrior Red Harvest.
But while this is a welcome update to the formula, in most other ways this is a stolidly traditional western. Fuqua shoots in widescreen, using tawny saturated colours that evoke the era of the original. The camera cringes slightly in front of the heroes: they are frequently shot from just below chin level, the better to emphasise manly jawlines and all-round studliness. The score, by James Horner and Simon Franglen, hits every western-genre cliche in the book: from hoedown fiddle to Aaron Copland-style Americana. And despite the feisty widow Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) claiming to have a monopoly on balls in the besieged small-town community of Rose Creek, there’s a touch of casual sexism here. When Emma saves Chisholm by shooting an adversary, he walks over and takes her rifle, later handing it to the nearest man. It’s certainly watchable stuff, but if Fuqua wasn’t going to do anything new with the material, you rather wonder what was the point?
