if you've got 144 minutes to kill, and you want them to go by pleasantly enough, there are worse ways to spend them then to watch The Magnificent Seven. I speak of the recent remake of course, the original is unseen by me, but The Seven Samurai is my jam, so I'm still qualified to say that this is a mostly okay film. The cast if pretty great, but most of them don't really have enough to do (is the pay in America really that much better, Mr.Byung-hun Lee?) , and Denzel has a chance to bury his charisma in a role that seemingly calls for it. Pratt is kind of lousy in this, but the other six guys make up for it by being more engaging than him. I know I'm sounding pretty down on a film that I on balance, enjoyed, but it feels like a whiff. I would imagine even people that enjoy it will still find lots of theoretical improvements to make to it. But what's here is engaging enough, pretty much.
What's the most disparate genre mix you can think of? If you said true crime/documentary/musical, well then London Road now exists to answer just what such an ungainly beast would look like. The sheer unconventional-ness of it carries it a long way, and the verbatim transcripts that it turns into unwieldy and inarticulate tunes (most repeated lyric? 'Um' or 'You Know'.) carries it the rest. Its kind of a gimmick, but its a pretty good one, rendering the still drab reality of normal people living through a seemingly dramatic situation. Still though, it does feel a bit padded, even with its brief running time (its about 4.5ifhs of a Magnificent 7), and the songs themselves aren't bad, but don't make quite so much of an impact, which for a musical, which is what this film mostly settles on being, is a slightly serious flaw. I would say its still worth a look though, its the best flawed film I've seen all year.
