Guns of the Magnificent Seven
Watching the audition stages to the X-Factor, it’s not always apparent to me which are supposed to be the ‘good’ acts and which are supposed to be the ‘bad’. Sometimes I’ll be cringing at the spikes of a voice that shoots to every note simultaneously like kids scattering from a car alarm, only to see its owner cheered on into the next round; other times I’ll just be thinking to myself “This isn’t that bad.” when Simon will brusquely end it with an am-dram wave. Fortunately, the producers have seen fit to cater to the likes of me by inserting fairly unsubtle visual clues as to the appropriate emotional responses to the performances, a winner wiped from screen by Geri’s appreciative head-bobbing, a loser doomed to warble over a montage of Louis Walsh looking like he can’t remember whether you’re supposed to fart outwards or in. Nobody ever just watches, everybody’s face is a regular hurdy gurdy of OMG!s and Whateva!s daring us to contradict them.
Guns of the Magnificent Seven deals in similar experiences, the provision of genuine excitement, awe or enjoyment being replaced by the expediency of reaction shots of a comic sidekick. Since it’s never clear whether what just happened was supposed to be funny or sad, or whether it even happened at all, the only way of keeping up with what’s going on, or what the director thinks is going on, is recourse to the expression on a Mexican’s face. I sometimes wonder why they bothered pointing the camera at anything else, a documentary of someone’s face whilst watching this film would be infinitely more interesting than the film itself.
And don’t get me started on George Kennedy as Chris Adams. It’s like one of those weird fan movies where someone tries to live out their dream of being Batman or Supergirl or James Bond or whatever, with only heavily-accented assertions that it’s supposed to be Yul Brynner’s character from the first films keeping us from concluding that it’s one of our mates’ dads. The best scenes play like an incredibly subtle pastiche of bad Westerns, Blazing Saddles by way of Douglas Sirk, whilst the worst ones are the cinematic equivalent of those puzzles where you have to shift the tiles around to make a picture; you could work it out, but why bother? When you think about the time and effort it takes to make any movie, it’s amazing that more of them don’t turn out like this; but when you think about Guns of the Magnificent Seven, it’s amazing that anybody bothers to keep making any at all.