A remake of the 1960 film The Magnificent Seven (then with Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson), director Antione Fuqua brings a modern view of a classic Western theme with a modern cast (Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke).

It is 1879. A really, really bad guy by the name of Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) is terrorizing the town of Rose Creek, about a three days’ ride from Sacramento. He “owns” the town, including the sheriff, and thinks nothing of killing a man in broad daylight in front of the entire town to make his point. Stand against me and I will kill you, your wife and your children.

When Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington), a bounty hunter, happens to come into town, Emma Cullen, the widow of a man just killed by Bogue, recruits him to help her avenge her husband and the free the town. Reminiscent of Ocean’s Eleven, Sam rounds up The Magnificent Seven, a band of outlaws, gamblers, hired guns and miscellaneous killers, and returns to Rose Creek to get the town ready for an epic showdown. True to the tricks of Home Alone, they booby-trap the town with deadly ambushes and dynamite. Of course, in the end, just like in The Seven Samurai, the dozens of townspeople turn out to be pretty worthless in the gun battle, and The Magnificent Seven have to do most of the killing.

The Magnificent Seven is a killing feast with body counts close to those of Saving Private Ryan or John Wick. There isn’t much going other than shooting Western gun man style on a grand scale.

In the end, it’s an entertaining film. The bad guys are REALLY bad, the good guys are rogues but since they fight for good, we root for them, and when the credits roll at the end, we realize we had a good time.

We watched an amalgam of The Seven Samurai, Ocean’s Eleven and Home Alone with a lot of gunfight violence.