How do you remake one of the best American westerns of all time? You do a bang up job of it, that’s how.
And from the look of The Magnificent Seven trailer, a remake of the 1960 classic starring Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach and Steve McQueen, things are looking promising. That film was itself a remake of the 1954 Japanese film Seven Samurai so it will be silly to complain about the new film as it is a remake of a remake.
The plot from the original, which is one of my favorite all time westerns, returns with this remake as we again see seven gunmen protecting a village from vicious bad guys, though the setting has changed from a Mexican village to a random old West village.

Denzel Washington takes over Brynner’s role as the “man in black” who assembles the gunmen. Washington again teams with Antoine Fuqua who directed him in crime drama Training Day (2001), the film in which he won his sole Best Actor Academy Award, and 2014’s vigilante thriller The Equalizer. Fuqua has extensive experience with action flicks including The Replacement Killers (1998), Tears of the Sun (2oo3) and Olympus Has Fallen (2013), which should serve him well with the western action of Magnificent Seven.
In the trailer we see Washington’s character, who sports an impressive ‘stache, chatting with a red haired woman about the bad men who have been menacing their community. Then we get shots of bad men doing bad things including beating up and shooting good folks.
Then we see Washington recruiting the seven played by actors Chris Pratt, who has become quite the breakout star, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, who has been having an impressive showing as Kingpin in Netflix’s Daredevil, and South Korean actor Lee Byung-hun (Terminator: Genisys). The seven also includes an American Indian complete with bow and arrow and war paint so it is definitely a more diverse group than in the original film. The main villain is played by a pale looking Peter Sarsgaard (Green Lantern, Black Mass).

The trailer then shows a lot of gun play, explosions and more gun play. We also get the obligatory shot of the seven walking down a dirt street looking all cool and stuff.
Now western remakes can be fantastic like 2010’s True Grit or wretched like 2013’s The Lone Ranger. The Magnificent Seven certainly has the cast and the man behind the camera to turn in an epic action packed western worthy of the name. Let’s all hope that they shoot straight and don’t miss.

So have you seen The Magnificent Seven trailer? What did you think of it? What other classic western should be remade? Feel free to comment below.
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