Pun Salad

So I'm a big Denzel Washington fan. And (of course) a fan of the original Yul Brynner/Steve McQueen translation of Seven Samurai.

And so I thought this would be great. And, meh, it wasn't that great. It was OK.

In comparison with the old version: it's in America, where nice white townspeople are being terrorized, not by an evil Mexican bandit, but by an evil Anglo capitalist. For reasons I missed, he just wants the townspeople to leave. Something to do with mining? Maybe.

Anyway, the townspeople make a fuss. The capitalist decides to make an example of one of the fussmakers, shooting him in cold blood, leaving him dead in the street.

[Leaving his grieving widow. And, reader, if you've seen more than a dozen or so movies, can you work out the most predictable scenario for this movie's climax? I could. And I was right.]

And then his henchmen slaughter a half-dozen or so others. Just because.

So the grieving widow sets out to hire some mercenaries to wage war against the capitalist. And gets Denzel, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, and … three other miscellaneous guys of appropriate cultural diversity. And … I may have dozed off a few minutes here and there, but eventually everything culminates in a very long battle scene.

Made me want to re-watch the old one.