Tag: Remakes

Aladdin (2019)

Will Smith and Mena Massoud restage Disney’s Aladdin beat for beat. Why?

Director: Guy Ritchie

Cast: Will Smith (Genie), Mena Massoud (Aladdin), Naomi Scott (Princess Jasmine), Marwan Kenzari (Jafar), Navid Negahban (The Sultan), Nasim Pedrad (Dalia), Billy Magnussen (Prince Anders), Numan Acar (Hakim), Alan Tudyk (Iago)

Disney’s passion for converting their vast animation back catalogue into life-action cash registers continues with Aladdin. And it won’t stop after this film blockbustered its way to a huge international cash haul. Why did it do so well? Probably because it reassuringly offers you exactly the same film as the animated original, bar a few extra sub plots to beef up the runtime. I mean this. This is the same film almost completely as the first one, but without Robin Williams. Which is a bit like saying it’s a Shakespeare remake without the language.

Anyway, everyone knows the story. Evil Jafar (Marwan Kenzari) wants the powerful lamp, it’s trapped in the Cave of Wonders and only “a diamond in the rough” can get it out. Aladdin (Mena Massoud) is that diamond, and wouldn’t you know he’s in prison after sneaking into the palace to meet Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott) with whom he has unknowingly fallen in love during her visit incognito onto the streets of Agrabah. Aladdin gets the lamp, but events mean he’s the guy who rubs it and gets the three wishes (and the friendship) of the Genie (Will Smith, using every inch of his personality to replace Robin Williams). 

Do people only see these films because they know exactly what they are going to get? Do the directors only make these films under tight instruction to deviate as little as possible from the animated original? What is there creatively in this sort of karaoke, where the biggest praise seems to be “it’s just like the cartoon”? I mean why not just watch the cartoon? As is invariably the case, it’s got far more wit, invention and energy. And it’s half an hour shorter.

This is one of the biggest photocopies I think they’ve done so far. I sat in the cinema genuinely puzzled and dumbfounded as to why this film exists. For much of the first hour, all the lines, the beats, the songs, some of the shots, much of the physical business – it was all the same. All of it.

It does have some new bits and pieces. Jasmine has been given a decent plotline about her dream of becoming the new Sultan being constantly restricted by her father not being able to imagine a girl ruling (she even gets a couple of new songs, which are decent in themselves but so tonally different to the rest of the film they feel crow-barred in). Jasmine also has a new handmaid who can serve as a love interest of the Genie. Iago the parrot has much of his scheming moved over to Jafar (who is made an expert pickpocket), while the film walks a confusing line between making Iago more sentient than a normal parrot, but less so than a human being. The ending has been tweaked into a chase around the streets of Agrabah to grab the lamp. But otherwise it’s basically all the same.

Guy Ritchie stamps no personality on it at all, but then that’s not what he’s been hired for. Instead he mounts the whole thing with a brash Broadway confidence. In fact that’s what the whole film feels like, a massive Broadway extravaganza that plays off the nostalgia felt towards the original by parents of the kids seeing this film. Perhaps that’s why so much is shot-for-shot the same, but at least I guess you can commend his attention to detail.

Casting wise, Naomi Scott is good as Jasmine (given by far and away the most new stuff to do compared to anyone else) and Mena Massoud does a decent job as Aladdin, although the character is as much of a bland pretty boy as he was in the original. Nasim Pedred has some very entertaining moments as the handmaid who attracts the Genie’s eye and supplies some good additional comic relief.

The real thing you want to know though is whether Will Smith is any good as the Genie. The part has been remixed for Will Smith’s skills and style as an actor (the songs have a notable different beat to them), and Smith plays it with a sense of comfy street cool, the fresh prince of the lamp. He does his absolute best here, and his charm and comic timing work as well as ever. But you watch him carefully recreate moments from the original that were flashes of Robin Williams improvisational brilliance, and your heart sinks. He never escapes from the shadow of that master of improvisation. And little moments here and there don’t stop you thinking “I bet if they could have digitally recreated Robin Williams they would have put him in here as well”. 

That’s the whole film though. Never quite enough to justify its existence. Its big, it’s pretty, it’s got some lovely song and dance bits in it, it’s all jolly good fun, there is nothing wrong with it – but it’s never, ever, ever anything more than a straight remake of a tighter, funnier, smarter film. Why does it exist? To make Disney money. And on that score it’s a huge success. And it means this is never, ever, ever going to stop.

The Man From UNCLE (2015)

Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill try, and fail, to get some zing out of The Man From UNCLE

Director: Guy Richie

Cast: Henry Cavill (Napoleon Solo), Armie Hammer (Ilya Kuryakin), Alicia Vikander (Gaby Teller), Elizabeth Debicki (Victoria Vinciguerra), Jared Harris (Adrian Sanders), Hugh Grant (Alexander Waverly), Luca Calvani (Alexander Vinciguerra), Sylvester Groth (Uncle Rudi), Christian Berkel (Udo Teller), Misha Kuznetsov (Oleg)

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.was a 1960s TV spy caper series, which I confess I’ve never seen an episode of but I’m reliably told (by my wife who has) that it’s all larks and fun. This Guy Ritchie remake, on the other hand, is a tonal mess that has no idea what the hell it is. Only Hugh Grant gets anywhere near to appearing in a caper movie – probably because he’s virtually the only member of the cast who might have grown up watching the original series.

Anyway, in the early 1960s Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) is an international master-thief turned CIA agent (this suggests his character is a whole lot more fun than he actually is). Ilya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) is a KGB super-agent, dealing with issues of psychosis (yup more fun to be had there). This odd couple are ordered to team up and work with car mechanic (no seriously) Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), whose father is working with renegade Italian fascists, led by femme fatale Victoria Viniciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki), to build a new nuclear mastery over the world. Or something.

It should be a ridiculous, overblown, mix of Bond and high 60s camp. Instead it’s dreary, chemistry-free, largely uninvolving sub-Mission: Impossible high jinks that I’m not ashamed to say I dozed off during at one point. Would that I had slept through more of it. It’s quite damning when the most enjoyable thing about it is thinking about the accent Olympics going on (we have a Brit playing an American, an American playing a Russian, a Swede playing a German, an Australian playing an Italian, an Irishman playing an American…).

No matter which way the three leads are arranged, Cavill, Vikander and Hammer have no chemistry at all in any combination. There is precisely zero bromance between the two leads. Vikander and Hammer have a will-they-won’t-they romance that comes from absolutely nowhere and leads nowhere (set up for sequels that will never come). Cavill looks the part, but completely lacks the cheeky, self-confident, “I’m-enjoying-all-this” charm that the part requires – instead he’s flat and boring. Hammer has more of the winking-at-the-camera cool, but he’s saddled with a part that frequently requires him to burst out in hotel-room-trashing outbursts of anger. Vikander just looks a bit bored with the whole thing.

These rather joyless characters go through a series of action set pieces, none of which got my pulse racing, and all of which felt like off cuts from a lousy Mission: Impossible sequel. Car chases, fisticuffs, gun fights, explosions, boat chases – they all tick by with no wit or pleasure involved anywhere. In these sort of things, you need to feel the characters are such adrenaline junkies that they sorta enjoy the crazy antics they get thrown into – you don’t get any of that from these three.

Much as I like Elizabeth Debicki, she can do little with her underwritten part – I mean I get that the plot isn’t the main thing in a film like this, but they could have at least given our villain a character. Instead she is as cardboard cut-out as the rest of the storyline. The acting from the bulk of the cast is also really odd – some seem aware they are in a tongue-in-cheek spy film, others seem to think they are in an espionage thriller. It’s a mess. There are scenes of pratfall comedy followed by grim scenes of torture and violence. In one juddering moment of this spy romp, the flipping Holocaust is dragged in as a shorthand for identifying a character as an “ultimate villain” – which given he had our hero strapped to a chair and was about to torture him, I think we could all have worked out without exploiting genocide. Anyone else think pulling this appalling real world event (with photos!) into a stupid caper movie is really tasteless? Did no one watch this thing while it was being edited?

I will say the design is pretty good and it’s well shot. But compare this to the fun and games of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films (which this is obviously trying to emulate) and the total lack of chemistry at its heart becomes immediately clear. Hugh Grant is a complete relief when he turns up as he’s the only actor who actually looks like he is enjoying his part and wants to be there. It was a big box office bomb and it’s no surprise. No one is having fun, the spirit of the original series seems to have been completely lost, and the lead actors totally fail to bring the leading-man pizzazz the film needs. Perfect if you want a nap.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)


Donald Sutherland is lost in the soulless world of Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Director: Philip Kaufman

Cast: Donald Sutherland (Matthew Bennell), Brooke Adams (Elizabeth Driscoll), Leonard Nimoy (Dr David Kibner), Jeff Goldblum (Jack Bellicec), Veronica Cartwright (Nancy Bellicec), Art Hindle (Dr Geoffrey Howell), Don Siegel (Taxicab Driver), Kevin McCarthy (Running Man)

Sometimes, as we look around our office-based world, it’s hard not feel that most of it is taking place on a weary treadmill. That we are going through the motions with no engagement or feeling, that we are all cogs in the same machine. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, like all great science fiction films, taps into this sense of individuality being lost in our modern age, and mixes it with a brilliant dose of Cold-War paranoia. Like much brilliant science-fiction, it offers a window on our world that makes us pause and reflect on our own lives.

Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) is a health inspector (has there been a less sexy job for a hero?) in San Francisco. One day his colleague Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) confesses to him that her boyfriend, dentist Geoffrey (Art Hindle), has changed so much that he feels like a completely different person. Turns out she’s not alone in the city – many people are reporting their loved ones have become distant and changed. While Matthew’s friend, celebrity psychiatrist Dr David Kibney (Leonard Nimoy), laughs off their concerns, Jack (Jeff Goldblum) and Nancy (Veronica Cartwright) Bellicec are keen to listen – especially when they find a copy of Jack growing in their home. Can the people of San Francisco really be being replaced by copies in an alien invasion?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is not just a great remake, it’s a great piece of film-making in its own right. It takes the ideas of the original and ramps them up into a Nixon-era paranoia fest, to create a creepy and unsettling film. It’s a film that perfectly understands the one thing all people value, perhaps more than any other, is their individuality and ability to feel and experience emotions. These are the two things the Pods take from you – in all other respects, the people are unchanged, they’re just unfeeling drones. 

What Philip Kaufman does really well is fill the film from the start with unsettling moments, and hints that things are wrong. The film opens with eerie visuals as the Pods arrive from space and slowly infect the vegetation of the planet. Unusual camera angles and lingering shots pick out people in the frame, behaving suspiciously robotically. Robert Duvall has a wordless (uncredited) cameo as a priest on a creaking swing in a playground – the sound and visuals both insanely unnerving, especially considering Duvall’s wordless intense stare. 

Pod people go about their work of taking over the earth with a relentless, eerie silence. Do they cling to silence so much, so that their piercing screams when they detect a rogue human can be heard? Late in the film, we see several instances of Pod people, freeze, point rigidly at an unconverted human, and then let out an inhuman shriek (it’s unsettling beyond belief). When pursuing humans, the run with a wild pack abandon. Throughout the film, the camera hovers on moments or scenes, asking us to wonder what’s going on. A floor cleaner mindlessly moves his cleaner across the floor and the camera lingers on him for what feels like ages – is he a pod person? Or is he just an ordinary Joe going about his work? Kaufman sprinkles moments like this throughout the film.

He and screenwriter WD Richter also tap into a sadness of the late 1970s – the world of the hippie, where it felt the world might change, is passing. Matthew, David and Jack all feel like old college buddies – you can imagine the three of them hanging out at Woodstock. Jack and Nancy have clung to their hippie lifestyle, but are reduced to running a mud-bath and trying to peddle Jack’s poetry to the bored and uninterested. David has repackaged himself into a soulless, impossibly vain and self-important TV psychiatrist, dishing out cod-advice and lapping up praise at swanky book launches. Matthew is a slightly grubby civil servant. Kaufman and Richter do a great job of suggesting the younger, more idealistic roots of these characters with minimal dialogue and action. It adds a rich theme to the film – are the Pod people and their mechanical, soulless routine just where the human race is going anyway? Is it any coincidence that the invasion takes places in hip San Francisco?

Kaufman shoots the film with an eerie off-kilterness, helped a lot by Michael Chapman’s excellent cinematography. Ben Burtt’s soundscape is also brilliant – from the creak of the swing at the start and the shriek of the Pod people, to the deafening silence late in the film of the almost completely converted San Francisco, as the Pod People go through the motions of their old lives, devoid of emotion. The design of the pods, and the growing replacement humans, is horribly eerie. This creepiness helps hammer home the sense of paranoia as more and more people are replaced by Pod people – leaving us, like the characters, constantly questioning who is “real” and who isn’t? Who can we trust?

Donald Sutherland is the perfect lead for this – he has both a slightly ground-down world-weariness but also a strong sense of maverick individuality. He’s an interesting, challenging actor and he’s very easy to empathise with. A lot of the film’s emotional force comes from the deep friendship (which could perhaps be more) between him and Brooke Adams (also very good). Leonard Nimoy offers a subtle inversion of his Spock persona, taking elements of Spock’s logical coldness and inverting them for both maximum smarm and creep. Goldblum and Cartwright are just about perfectly cast, with Cartwright especially good (and reaffirming her scream-queen skills) as a woman with a surprisingly sharp survival instinct.

Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is easy to overlook in the list of great American 1970s thrillers due to being both (a) a remake and (b) a science-fiction film. But this is an unsettling investigation of an America on the verge of changing from one type of generation to another. It’s unsettling, intriguing and gripping – wonderfully made and very well acted. It’s a film that understands paranoia, isolation and our love of our own individuality more than many others I can think of. It’s one of the great American 1970s films.

Poseidon (2006)


Our characters (such as they are) struggle from cliche to cliche in Poseidon

Director: Wolfgang Peterson

Cast: Josh Lucas (Dylan Johns), Kurt Russell (Robert Ramsey), Jacinda Barrett (Maggie James), Richard Dreyfuss (Richard Nelson), Emmy Rossum (Jennifer Ramsey), Mike Vogel (Chris Saunders), Mia Maestro (Elena Morales), Kevin Dillon (Lucky Larry), Freddy Rodriguez (Marco Valentin), Andre Braugher (Captain Michael Bradford)

In the 1970s the big tent-pole movies were all disaster films. They were the superhero films of their day. They also followed a very clear formula: big stars, big man-made structures, big crashing natural forces sweeping away man’s pride. Lots of death and tear jerking, with sub-plots for each character that could have been pulled out of an episode of EastEnders.

Poseidon is a remake of sorts of The Poseidon Adventure – but with plot and characters changed (not for the better). There is a ship called the Poseidon. It’s hit by a tsunami. It gets overturned, trapping the survivors at the top (now the bottom) of the ship. While most wait to be rescued, our heroes decide to climb down (now up) the ship to the hull to escape. Of course, not all of them will make it!

You notice I didn’t mention any characters there. That’s because what this film laughably calls its characters are so crudely drawn, they barely qualify as human beings, let alone characters. They exist purely to get into trouble. We spend only the most rudimentary time getting to know them before they (and their loosely defined characteristics) start dropping like flies. This is an anti-actor film – literally anyone off the street could play these parts, so disinterested is the film in them.

So we’ve got Kurt Russell as an over-protective father and Emmy Rossum as his semi-rebellious daughter. Will they grow closer together over the film? You betcha. Will Russell learn to accept the place his daughter’s boyfriend has in her life? Of course. Will “I work better alone” professional gambler Josh Lucas learn that he needs other people? Nope. Just kidding of course he does. Will suicidal architect Richard Dreyfuss discover a new love of life? See where I’m going?

In fact it’s so completely predictable you can take a pretty good guess who will make it and who won’t based solely on the opening few minutes. Some of its decisions lack any form of sensitivity. Any character from a remotely racial minority? Let’s just say that their chances are not good (Dreyfuss needs to actually kick Rodriguez’s waiter down a shaft so he doesn’t drag the others down – I thought at first “there’ll be consequences to that” – but nope it’s never mentioned again). Anyway, all the surviving characters are loaded white guys. One of them does need to make “the ultimate sacrifice” to save the others but, again, their identity can be pretty much worked out in the opening minutes. The most unpleasant character in the film? Yup he dies.

In fact you watch the film and feel sorry for the actors. Not only are the characters wafer-thin, but they spend so much time silently underwater or getting soaked, they look like they are suffering a lot for nothing. The focus is entirely on the mechanical progression from set-piece to set-piece, all of which stink of familiarity. So we get the long swim under water (of course someone gets trapped!), the impassable ravine that needs crossing (of course someone is stuck on the other side), the claustrophobic tunnel (of course one of the characters has claustrophobia). There is even a bit where the terminally stupid fucking kid wanders off and needs to be rescued. Is there anything new in this? It’s a re-tread of every disaster film ever.

Wolfgang Peterson directs all this with a professional detachment and disinterest that makes you want to cry that he once made Das Boot. If there is one thing he knows, it’s shooting confined spaces (see not only Das Boot but also Air Force One) and he makes the onslaught of water look pretty good. But this is such a piece of hack work, you despair that he clearly needed the money. The special effects are pretty good I guess (although the CGI ship looks totally dated), but it’s a staid, dead, predictable film.

It only really works in an “it passed the time watching it in two chunks over a couple of breakfasts” way. Because there is literally nothing new, interesting, unique, intelligent, imaginative, dynamic or individual about it, it passes in front of your eyes like a bland wall-paper. Compared to the classic disaster films of the 1970s it’s not fit to lace their explosions. Totally empty, unchallenging rubbish.

Beauty and the Beast (2017)


Dan Stevens and Emma Watson faithfully recreate almost shot-by-shot a much better cartoon

Director: Bill Condon

Cast: Emma Watson (Belle), Dan Stevens (The Beast), Luke Evans (Gaston), Kevin Kline (Maurice), Josh Gad (LeFou), Ewan McGregor (Lumiere), Stanley Tucci (Maestro Cadenza), Ian McKellen (Cogsworth), Audra McDonald (Madame de Garderobe), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Plumette), Hattie Morahan (Agathe)

hhBeauty and the Beast was released at the perfect time. The generation who grew up watching the original could now take their children – or revisit the fond memories with their parents. It was a chance for everyone to wallow in sentimental nostalgia. Disney knew its market would be people who wanted something as close as possible to what they remembered: they certainly delivered.

Surely you know the story by now? But in case you’ve been living under a rock for your entire life: Belle (Emma Watson) is the beautiful but bookish village girl who dreams of a something more than this provincial life. When her father Maurice (Kevin Kline) is imprisoned by a horrific Beast, Belle volunteers to take his place and stays in the castle. The Beast and all his servants are enchanted and only true love can break the spell – will Belle and the Beast fall in love?

I would ask why Disney feels the need to make what are effectively shot-by-shot remakes of their animated classics, but the fact this raked in almost a billion dollars at the box office kinda answers that question. But make no mistake, creatively this is karaoke: a few small flourishes have been thrown in, but effectively it’s a faithful recreation of a film that was already pretty much perfect to begin with. In fact, watching it, the only real emotion I felt was a desire to watch the “real” thing again. Damningly, twice my wife and I stopped to look up the equivalent scenes from the original on YouTube: in every case they were better.

That’s the big problem. Of all these remakes, only The Jungle Book was a genuine reimagining of the original. This one follows Cinderella and hews as close as possible to the film you’ve already seen. The plot is identical. The song and dance sequences are the same. The characterisations are the same. Hell, half the line readings are the same. It’s a film that is so dependent on people’s affection for the original that it’s terrified of offering anything too different from it. In which case – why not just watch the original? Would you rather look at a poster or the actual Mona Lisa?

Condon has thrown in some new pieces here and there to get an extra 30 minutes of action. One decent invention does involve the spell also causing the villagers to forget the castle exists, which is neat. The others add less. Belle has been turned into as much of an inventor as her father and, in one particularly bizarre sequence, invents the washing machine. There is a rather confused sequence involving a magic book which allows the Beast to go anywhere in the world (the witch clearly left a plethora of magic devices behind to entertain the Beast) – raising the question of why he needs that enchanted mirror, since he can apparently physically travel through both space and time with his Tardis-book. LeFou is subtly reimagined as gay – but this is very quietly done so as not to damage the film’s box-office potential in some markets.

There is a rather clumsily done storyline around Belle’s mother dying of plague when she was a baby, which also adds nothing. The film may possibly be trying to construct some kind of clunky commonality between the Beast and Belle with their parental traumas, but a dead mother with a rose fetish shares little with the stereotypical Cold Abusive Aristocrat father the Beast has – and anyway, they’re already giving them plenty of common ground through the good stuff they’ve lifted straight from the original film. Nothing else new really stands out.

In fact, the film is so studiously faithful, you get annoyed when it deviates from the original – particularly as it invariably does scenes less well. The final battle between Gaston and the Beast suffers horribly, with the emotional narrative of the fight thoroughly muddled, in contrast with the original’s clear and efficient storytelling. In the original, the Beast despairs and refuses to save himself from Gaston’s attack until he sees Belle. Here, he’s sort of defending himself and sort of not, and Belle is given some action nonsense, and Gaston’s death is turned from a clean narrative (one treacherous thrust hits home, then in sadistically going for the second he falls to his death) into a strange sequence where he stands and brutally shoots at the Beast repeatedly until the stonework beneath him randomly collapses and send him plummeting to his doom.

None of this, however, compares to the butchering of the moment when Belle discovers the library. In the original this is an endearingly sweet moment, with the Beast overcome with excitement at giving Belle a gift she really wants. The audience shares in his delight, and is charmed by his touching anxiety that she will like it, just as they share in her wonder at the discovery. It’s a major moment in the growth of their relationship. Here it’s thrown away – the Beast shows her the library in a fit of irritation at her pedestrian Shakespeare tastes. The film gives all the time and emotional weight to the tedious “magic book” sequence, where they travel to the “Paris of my childhood” and discover that, yup, Belle’s mum died of plague. Well that was both depressing and uninteresting…

Anyway – take a look at those two library scenes…

The acting is pretty good. Emma Watson does a decent job, particularly considering the pressure on her. She performs the songs prettily, although they don’t soar the way they did when performed by someone with the vocal power of Paige O’Hara. Her Belle is thoughtful but has a level of defiance and independence that’s been stepped up from the original. Dan Steven’s Beast is much more of a prince under a ghastly shell – unlike the original he’s literate, can dance and is well spoken (which makes his moments of animalism and his soup eating failure stick out all the more). The rest of the cast are fine – Ewan McGregor is as flamboyant as you’d expect, Emma Thompson sings the song very well, Kevin Kline makes a lot of Maurice. However for each of them, there are moments when you remember fondly that the animators invested the originals with more emotion.

The one member of the cast who does stand out is Luke Evans. How is the guy not a star yet? Sure the swaggering braggart Gaston might be the best part in the whole film, but Evans nails it with all the energy and egotism you would expect. His scenes are the best in the film by far, and he’s the only one who manages to do something a little different with his role.

Of course it looks fabulous, but it feels somehow a little bit empty. All the things that move you are done (mostly better) in the original – in fact, a major part of why they move you is the memory of the original. The acting is pretty good and it’s well filmed and made – the design is terrific. But honestly, with the original out there what’s the point? Why would you watch this rather than the other one? It’s not as moving, it’s not as exciting, it’s not as funny, it’s not as charming. All it does is to try and recreate the original as closely as possible. You can stage Hamlet thousands of times and each production would be different, but Disney can’t stage Beauty and the Beast twice without replicating it.

If you want it to exactly match your memories, without being quite as good, it’s the film for you. If you want a Disney live-action film that feels like something original, watch The Jungle Book.

The Magnificent Seven (2016)


Denzel Washington leads his gang of seven wildly different souls to do battle for the little guy

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Cast: Denzel Washington (Sam Chisolm), Chris Pratt (Joshua Faraday), Ethan Hawke (Goodnight Robicheaux), Vincent D’Onofrio (Jack Horne), Byung-hun Lee (Billy Rocks), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (Vasquez), Martin Sensmeier (Red Harvest), Haley Bennett (Emma Cullen), Peter Sarsgaard (Bartholomew Bogue), Luke Grimes (Teddy Q)

The Magnificent Seven is a much loved staple of BBC bank holiday weekend screenings. The original wasn’t a brilliant piece of film-making art, but it was a brilliant piece of film-making entertainment, and it had simple, wry, heartfelt (if sometimes on-the-nose) observations to make about the sacrifices the life of a gunslinger calls for. How does the remake measure up?

In 1879, the village of Rose Creek is besieged by would-be industrialist Bartholomew Brogue (Peter Sarsgaard), who orders the villagers to leave as he plans to expand the local mine. Newly widowed Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) sets out to recruit gunslingers to help protect the town. Warrant Officer Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington) is her first recruit, and he helps her to gather six others from drunken cardsharp Joshua Faraday (Chris Pratt) to legendary sharpshooter Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke). But the battle to protect the village will lead to many good men six feet under before our heroes can have the chance to prevail…

One thing’s for sure. In 60 years’ time they won’t be playing this film every bank holiday weekend. That doesn’t mean this is a bad film, it’s just quite an average one. It’s decently done, has several good scenes and even one or two witty lines in among a fairly routine script, but there is very little imagination or inspiration behind this. It’s got a decent cast of actors, but you always feel they are lifting average material rather than working with the good stuff. While the original film combined a sense of boyhood heroics and some iconic performances with some exploration of the emptiness of the life of a gunslinger and the attraction of a normal life, this film manages to deliver much less on all these counts.

So first the good parts. Much of the gun-toting action is very well done. The first shootout as our heroes arrive in the town is terrific (see link below), full of thrilling beats and rewindable moments. To be honest, it’s the best moment of the film, and as close as it comes to capturing the excitement of old-school gunslinging action. The final battle scene is decent, but offers generally more of the same with additional (no spoilers to say) sacrifice. Even without the inspirations of the original film, many of the character beats will be familiar to the watching audience. I successfully predicted which of the cowboys would survive early in the film, and only one death is near to a surprise. It’s well done, but it’s not got the filmmaking expertise of Kevin Costner’s Open Range, with its final small-band-against-an-army structure, nor that film’s intelligent and low-key analysis of the cost of violence.

It’s that lack of human insight that I think is one of the film’s principal weaknesses. The original had more to say about the damage a life of violence can inflict on people, and the longing even the most hardened man of the world can find for  the simple life – as well as the lengths they will go to in order to protect it. This film offers none of that. The motivations for the seven in joining are incredibly thin, almost after-thoughts. At least two members of the team simply turn-up, as if dropped from the sky. Team leader Chris has a “very personal” motivation, signposted from the very start, that serves to undermine much of the depths we seem to learn about his character during the film – as well as making him just another “man looking for revenge” architype.

On top of that, a serious trick is missed when setting this film near the end of the Western era. Already the time of these lawless gunslingers is coming to an end, and they have no place in the modern world. The villain is a sort of corporate bully, launching a hostile take-over of the village for his mining company. There is plenty of thematic material to mine here of these men taking a stand not only against the strong persecuting the weak, but also against the onrush of time that is leaving them behind. Now I’m not expecting the film to be a serious socio-economic discussion, but I’d like to watch a film that at least tips the hat to ideas like this (or any ideas at all) rather than just push through a well-filmed but-by-the-numbers remake.

Saying all this, it is pretty entertaining in an unchallenging way. It does make you want to go back and re-watch the original version (which was itself, to be fair, little more than a crowd pleaser). But that’s kind of all it is – and it doesn’t have any ambition to be more. But it’s a good watch and some of the updating ideas work very well. The multiracial composition of the seven works very well, and Haley Bennett as the “Eighth” member of the team, is a strongly written role that feels like a character rather than an accessory. Washington can do this role standing on his head, but brings his customary authority. Chris Pratt is at his Harrison Fordish charming best, particularly on the edge of bursting out into a childish grin, in gleeful excitement at being paid to play cowboys. Hawke is saddled with the thematic content as a gunslinger with PTSD, but makes a good fist of it. Much of the rest of the gang are a collection of moments rather than characters, but do their jobs well.

The Magnificent Seven, it seems too easy to say, isn’t magnificent. It’s an unambitious film without any real thinking or imagination in its conception. It seems scared of introducing anything too conceptual or thought-provoking in its setting or plot. It’s just about entertaining enough to survive while you are watching it, but its life is going to be little longer than the two hours you watch it, not the 60 years of its predecessor.