Return of the Seven.
“The first hazard for the returning hero is his fame.” - Babe: Pig in the City
The only difference between now and then, despite the crowing of countless right-wing Cassandras at the gates, is that THEY had the sense to call their remakes ’sequels’. Taste then was not any more rarified than it is now, audiences weren’t that much smarter, it’s just that we take what we’re given and it has now been found that we don’t need to be 
given that much. Living is tough, and folks are entitled to sit through two hours of loud noises and actors running away from explosions just to not have to think of anything to say to anyone else for a couple of hours. They’d sit through two hours of witty, sartorial dialogue, well-developed characterisation and artistic meaningfulness as well, I suppose, but that wouldn’t cost so much and certainly wouldn’t give anyone the weird satisfaction of pandering to the tastes of ‘the public’. Ah, who to blame, who to blame.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that remakes and reboots and sequels are by no means symptomatic of the particular age in which we live. Some things have got worse, but not because people have got worse, merely because companies have, because executives have become very adept at scaling down services and products to precisely a hair’s breadth before the tipping point where we’d start complaining about them. Back in the day, studios could unabashedly make B-movies because the very concept of the B-movie predicated the existence of the A-movie. What’s changed is that now every movie is a B-movie. That’s all.
The Magnificent Seven is possibly the best remake ever. Return of the Seven is probably the worst. Comparisons are instructive.
How do we know Return of the Seven is a remake rather than a sequel? Well, the characters don’t seem to remember anything like this ever having happened to them before. Whilst I personally am not surprised to find one working day being essentially similar to another, I should have thought that the point of becoming a wandering gunslinger was specifically to avoid that kind of mind-numbing quotidian. But no matter, if Yul Brynner doesn’t mind clocking in for another bout of Sisyphean slog, why should it bother us? Even the villagers have apparently forgotten ever having been terrorised by banditos before, tearfully pleading eternal gratitude and remembrance to their potential saviours, a touching moment which, in Futurama, would be interrupted by a cut-scene of sarcastic laughter eminating eerily from the long-untended graves of the previous Seven.
Everything is compacted in a remake, not just abbreviated but squeezed up, squashed in. There are no bridging scenes, no interweaving of subplots, just problem and resolution elbow-jostling like brolly-carrying civil servants on the Tube. I particularly like the way the complex relationship between the essentially conservative and suspicious peasants and their morally ambiguous ‘protectors’, so carefully developed in the original, is here short-circuited to the head peasant’s “We Are Cowards” speech and Yul Brynner’s “Yes, But You’re OUR Cowards” rejoinder. But I always feel sorry for Yul Brynner. In the first movie, under constant threat of being upstaged by what I alas feel entitled to call “a star-studded cast”, he is Cool. In the second movie, surrounded by poorly-realised Mexican stereotypes, he is like somebody’s big brother joining in their dressing-up games. The recurring pulse of sad certainty that there is something mentally wrong with him is as gently metronomic as the bouncing ball on the karaoke screens from which the supporting cast seem to be reading their lines.
I imagine it gets worse, but I can’t remember how. It’s a bit thick, though, to make fun of Return for not being better than it was intended to be. But I keep finding myself watching these things in awful fascination, and asking myself who were they meant for? Return would have had the excuse of a residual audience from the original, but how many of the target audience for the remake of The Hills Have Eyes would have seen or even heard of the original? (The fewer the better, by the way, the first The Hills Have Eyes having all the faults of a remake without the justification of a source material, the original having apparently been a madman’s dream crossed with Starsky & Hutch.) I have these weirdly Marxist fantasies in which cinema audiences will rise up against it all, against being able to go to the biggest multiplex in Glasgow on a Saturday afternoon and not a thing, not a fucking thing on two dozen screens being worth two hours of your life let ALONE the gargantuan cheek of ticket prices and salty popcorn and, oh, all of it. A couple of years ago I went to see the remake of The Wicker Man. It was full of people who, as I remember it, had turned up too late to get in to Little Man, and who hooted and jeered and chucked confectionery all throughout the showing. I, on the other hand, tried to watch the movie.
They were right.