For the week of December 19th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Antoine Fuqua's big-budget remake of The Magnificent Seven to Blu-ray. For a piece of populist entertainment, this new Magnificent Seven has a lot to live up to; it has to avoid tarnishing the legacy of the original (which remains one of the ten or so greatest American Westerns ever made), AND it has to suggest that Training Day wasn't a fluke for Fuqua, the lone film of substance drowning in a sea of middling populist entertainments. The verdict? Sort of on the first count, and a big same as it ever was on the second. At no point does Fuqua's Magnificent Seven make you forget about its John Sturges-directed, Steve-McQueen-and-Yul-Brenner-starring predecessor, but you can certainly do a lot worse. Yes, the new iteration treats about 71.4% of its main protagonists (Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Lee Byung-hun, Vincent D'Onofrio, Martin Sensmaier, and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) as window-dressing (of the seven, only Hawke and Byung-hun give their characters any semblance of an inner life - I would have preferred a Western that focused on their exploits before this movie started), and the Richard Wenk-Nic Pizzolatto script offers nothing in the way of narrative surprises, but when big-screen Westerns are as rare as they are today, you take what you can get. This Magnificent Seven has a number of good action sequences (the forty-minute siege that concludes the film would be even better if Fuqua wasn't saddled with satisfying a PG-13 rating - some of the best action beats get Cuisinart'ed to avoid showing any real carnage) and looks fantastic (courtesy of Fuqua's Academy Award-winning DP Mauro Fiore), and really, that's enough. But I keep returning to this question of Antoine Fuqua and Wasted Promise. Even when it goes off the rails narratively (the ideal version of the film ends with a certain character receiving an unceremonious death in a bathtub), Training Day remains a marvel, and I 100% credit Fuqua with its success - as good as stars Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke are, it's Fuqua who pulls off the picture's tricky tonal shifts between gritty social realism and pulp thriller. The Magnificent Seven, by comparison, is passable, but passable isn't good enough. Over time, you can't help seeing Fuqua's missed opportunities. Like how despite the film's noteworthy stabs at racial diversity (only three of the seven are white guys), the movie's gender dynamic couldn't be more problematic; Haley Bennett (who I'd bet money got the part once Jennifer Lawrence turned it down) plays the townsperson who seeks out the Seven, and the film sets her up for an emerging action-heroine arc that simply never materializes (she spends the third act hiding and dodging bullets). Or how the movie isn't even all that interested in doing anything with its mixed-race team dynamics, despite its shameless efforts to ape Quentin Tarantino's postmodern-Western masterpiece Django Unchained at every turn (the scene where Washington first meets Pratt plays like a poetry-free version of the conversation where Dr. Schultz explains his mission to Django over beers, and Peter Sarsgaard's histrionic villain lives in what I'm pretty sure is the Candieland plantation house). Or how Fuqua gets the worst performances of their respective careers from Washington and Pratt. Washington looks great but sleepwalks through the film, and Pratt is horrifically miscast. Between this and Jurassic World, I am so not sold on him as an action hero, especially considering he's got to play a shifty, alcoholic, ice-cold badass, and all the while I kept drifting whenever he was on screen, replacing him with more appropriate choices (Steve McQueen from the original. Matthew McConaughey or Colin Farrell fifteen years ago. Jeff Bridges or Kurt Russell in the early 1980s). Hell, considering the movie's female problem, you could have replaced Pratt with Jennifer Lawrence and fixed the film's feminist AND badass bonafides; say what you will about the Hunger Games movies, but Lawrence is utterly persuasive wielding a firearm and taking down bad guys in ways that Pratt may never be. The whole movie starts feeling like a whiff, and in retrospect, it's even harder to focus on its good qualities. I'm still holding out hope for Antoine Fuqua, but Training Day is a long way a ways...
Martin Liebman couldn't have had a more different take on the picture, writing that "it finds that happy medium middle ground between classic and contemporary, light and serious, fundamentally faithful and fluidly original. Perhaps more than anything else that makes the movie a success -- its authentic period feel, performances, score, cinematography -- it's the obvious love with which it's been crafted, a love of the material and the genre alike that helps the movie overcome any nitpick-y shortcomings in its translation to 2016. Fuqua gives himself plenty of room to play by respecting the past and making the movie his own, but still texturally and, mostly, fundamentally a classic Western in every way beyond the date it was made and some of the snappier filmmaking techniques that only enhance the movie, not overwhelm or lessen it…The film boasts expert production values that, as the name implies, value authenticity but, at the same time, breathe life into the movie and ready it for the steady cadence of its heartbeat that the cast provides. The film's diverse 'seven' melt into the movie. Never is it about where they come from or what they look like, at least beyond those times the movie makes mention in some form or fashion. It's instead about what they can do together, the individual qualities that make them a rugged and ready unit. Cast camaraderie is terrific, the actors' skills with blades or firearms never appear unnaturally practiced, and they wear the clothes and ride the horses like they grew up on the range. Fuqua gets the most from his cast, one of the most likable collections one will ever find in the Western genre. Vincent D'Onofrio and Byung-hun Lee steal the show, while Denzel Washington is perfectly cast as the group's stalwart leader. Chris Pratt epitomizes the movie, delivering a performance that's equal parts fun and serious and all Western."
From Warner Home Entertainment comes Clint Eastwood's latest docudrama Sully. The latest in the Academy Award-winning filmmaker's unofficial series of films that examine contemporary American history, Sully follows Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) as he faces an inquest over his involvement in the "Miracle on the Hudson" plane landing. Some of you might be thinking, "Hey, that doesn't sound like enough for a movie," and if so, you've hit on Sully's biggest problem. While I respect the terseness with which Eastwood approaches these few days in Sully's life (at just over ninety minutes long, Sully has the kind of narrative economy that Eastwood's mentor Don Siegel would have loved), the story itself wasn't that complicated. Sully saved a lot of people in an impossible situation, and the nation rejoiced. That's about it, but that version would only occupy about a half-hour of screen time, so Todd Komarnicki's script (which plays like another one of Eastwood's patented "Shoot the First Draft" moves) tries to burrow into Sully's mind, charting the indecision and unease (partially brought on by PTSD) that Sully couldn't shake post-crash. Again, I respect the instinct, and Hanks is certainly up to the challenge - whatever my issues with the film are, he delivers a thoughtful, sensitive performance - but the narrative just isn't there, so we get one repetitive scene after another of Sully wrestling with his demons. Still, that material is better than Eastwood and Komarnicki's other attempts to manufacture tension. If their film has a villain, it's the National Transportation Safety Board, personified by Anna Gunn and Mike O'Malley, both of whom spending their time raking poor Sully over the coals for his actions. There's just one problem - the NTSB was just doing its job (it's standard operating procedure to investigate this kind of passenger-air incident), and both the real Sully Sullenberger AND Hanks seem to take issue with this degree of dramatic license. It doesn't help that Gunn and O'Malley are such sneering, officious baddies - they're less individuals than a walking, talking screed against government regulatory committees. But ultimately, my biggest issue with Sully isn't its political agenda but its slightness. Love him or hate him, Clint Eastwood is one of our most important screen auteurs, and Sully simply isn't worth his time.
The worst film of the week? Well, that would be Lionsgate's release of the Rob Zombie thriller 31. I'm not a kneejerk Zombie hater. The Devil's Rejects is one of the great horror films of the new century, and The Lords of Salem has a mounting, slow-burn intensity that feels like some singular fusion of David Lynch and Roman Polanski (only the last ten minutes, which play like horrible outtakes from a Rob Zombie music video, keep that film from achieving modern-classic status); I even respect the gonzo invention of his Halloween II, even though the film as a whole is a mess. But 31 feels like the movie that his detractors have been calling him out for since 2003's House of 1000 Corpses misfire. Imagine being stuck in a broken Halloween funhouse when the lights keep flashing neon pain and the (painfully loud) soundtrack keeps flitting between '70s classic rock and screaming death-metal, and you'll have a sense of what enduring 31 entails. In fact, I suspect actually going to a terrible funhouse ride is better because it's shorter - 31 runs only 102 minutes but feels like three days, given that a) none of what happens matters (something something fight to the death on Halloween against clown-faced psychos; something something wait why are Judy Geeson and Malcolm McDowell in this movie?) and b) we don't care about anyone, considering that Zombie writes his heroes (Sheri Moon-Zombie, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Meg Foster, Kevin Jackson, and Freddie "Boom- Boom" Washington, himself, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) as foul-mouthed, sexist horndogs whose major character developments are marked by discovering new ways to refer to male and female genitalia. Their struggle, as it were, culminates in an endless series of dark-lit fleeing through a generic industrial complex, punctuated by moments of unpleasant bloodshed. I felt like I was watching the rehearsal run for the real movie - I know 31 was Kickstarted, but even Zach Braff's crowd-funded movie looks more polished and expansive than this one. Part of me wonders if 31 is supposed to function as self-parody. By the time the protagonists have to face a Mexican Nazi little-person (yep, you read that right), two rape-obsessed chainsaw maniacs, and a German sadist in a diaper, anything remotely scary about 31 has left the building, but Zombie still stages the violence in such a personal and brutal fashion that we're too horrified to laugh at it. To its credit, 31 does manage one semi-memorable creation: Richard Brake's Doom-Head, who dresses like Nosferatu and has a disquieting affinity for using his own blood as red face-paint, but Zombie manages to bungle these moments every time Brake opens his mouth to spout Zombie's terrible, misanthropic, distractingly vulgar dialogue (Zombie writes like a thirteen-year-old boy who has seen all of Tarantino's movies and learned all the wrong lessons). By the time we get to an ending that plays like a wolf-free pisstake of The Grey's climax, I found myself fantasizing about time better spent than watching 31: digging a hole, for example, or being very quiet for an extended period of time. Skip it, and with extreme prejudice.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "one of the kind of odd things about Rob Zombie is that on this disc's commentary track and in even in less 'formal' situations like Q & A sessions, he comes off as incredibly intelligent, articulate and often quite funny. Unfortunately very little of any of those qualities have matriculated to 31, a film which plays like a vignette-laden 'greatest hits' (in both meanings of that word) assemblage of gruesome deaths and ridiculous plot mechanics. The carnies of course find themselves taken captive fairly early in the film, and while it's fun to see hyperbolic villains portrayed by Malcolm McDowell, Judy Geeson and Jane Carr, there's absolutely no underlying reason given for the mayhem or even for the fact that these three characters in particular look like they've wandered out of a nearby episode of Versailles…In some ways, 31 kind of oddly reminded me of the excesses of latter-day Twin Peaks episodes, and not just because of the presence of a discomfiting dwarf. Much like the David Lynch outing, 31 is full of arresting imagery that never seems to fully support a story, or perhaps more accurately, there's no story to fully support what is often a gruesome but visceral visual experience."