The new trailer for The Magnificent Seven is accompanied by Heavy Young Heathens’ cover of The House Of The Rising Sun. As musical choices go, it’s a pretty pointed one: here's a fresh take on an old classic, it's telling us, and we need to approach it with fresh ears (or eyes). Suspend your judgment and check it out below.
Sure enough, it’s a none-more-modern-looking affair. Like The Hateful Eight, the characters – a gunslinging septet – are the key here. The movie will live or die by the chemistry between Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and their posse of desperadoes. There may not be any singing bushes or plethora of piñata in evidence, but expect plenty of comic putdowns and cowboy patter sharper than a fistful of cactus thorns.
Antoine Fuqua’s redo of John Sturges’ classic Western (itself a redo of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai) pitches the seven against evil industrialist Peter Sarsgaard and his countless henchmen, who are menacing a defenceless village. The body count is so high, they’ve had to borrow the Gatling gun from The Wild Bunch.
The full line-up is Sam Chisolm (Washington), Josh Farraday (Pratt), Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), Billy Rocks (Byung-Hun Lee), Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier).
Your local multiplex will be attaching swing doors to its entrance on September 23 when The Magnificent Seven arrives in the UK.