Chisholm also decides to recruit one of his bounties, sparing his life; he becomes the fifth magnificent, Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). The last two recruits are a Native American called Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier) and a possibly unstable man named Jack played by none other than Vincent D’Onofrio.
The movie centres around an evil man that must be stopped at all costs, and so seven men turn themselves into a very powerful team, combining their unique skill sets. The narrative of this movie is such that its success depends on its execution.
Considering this criterion, the movie is unbelievably flat. This is mainly because the personalities of these joyful actors are totally masked by the characters and roles they assume.
The plot is also incredibly straightforward moving from point A to B and to C. This lack of momentum is very visible especially in the few moments where the movie briefly sparks into life. Really, a reunion of Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington is expected to be a most dramatic scene (as they were co-stars in the movie Training Day), but this expectation doesn’t just come to fruition.
One of the major problems is that The Magnificent Seven relies too much on the background and plot of its first versions. There also seems to be no sense of period and setting. The characters in this story could have been played by any group of actors, but the star studded magnificent just couldn’t do a good job of finding depth.
The dialogues referenced concepts like righteousness and justice but there’s little sincerity in it. The movie is also such a modern reiteration of an old movie with an assembly of super characters that makes it look like a western version of The Avengers.
On paper, this movie possessed such high potentials but after seeing it, one only finds out that the only impressive feature of the movie is its main characters who are men of the people and fan favorites. Therefore, an average movie watcher would only see these actors and would definitely miss the wasted potentials the movie had.