Antoine Fuqua continues his journey updating stories with slick violence in The Magnificent Seven. Stars once again team up to defend a small town from violence and robbery as the did in 1960 and even earlier in The Seven Samurai. This time a corrupt business man wants to take over the fair folk’s mine

Denzel Washington is introduced in a scene ripped from Django Unchained, collecting a bounty and explaining himself only after a dozen citizens train their guns on him. He’s putting in good work but no one would mistake this for a “Denzel Washington Movie”. I say this to his credit. Washington becomes part of the ensemble even though he could have taken over considering his star power and relationship with Fuqua. His sparring partner is Chris Pratt who is woefully miscast. He is good in scenes with tension but everything else plays like he’s too cool for school.

Making his Training Day reunion with Fuqua and Washington is Ethan Hawke as a newly gun shy vet. Vincent D’onofrio is hilarious as a high-pitched mumbling mountain man. The rest of the cast is uniquely multicultural, a Mexican, Indian, and Korean man, but unfortunately I don’t have much to say about them because the film doesn’t either. Some may take this as Hollywood tokenism but it befits their ragtag style. No one makes mention of it even as their diversity underlines several scenes. Like Fast and the Furious during reparations.

When the violence comes, it is horrifying and plentiful. The viewer will wonder if there are townspeople left to inhabit their liberated land. I believed this earned an R rating but the the old PG-13 loophole is employed where bodies apparently have no blood. This film is meaner than the original. Where Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen meet as good samaritans with easy chemistry, Washington and Pratt meet as violent disruptors who form a bond out of necessity. In the 1960s, the promise of the village’s gold was a joke, then the inspiration for a poetic sendoff. In screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto’s village, the mine is a literal cause for bloodshed.

Some may overlook this particular gripe but The Magnificent Seven joins a recent string of period pieces shot digitally with jaundiced land a turquoise sky (think In the Heart of the Sea). The setting is dirtier and skin is tanner, but the filter makes the whole enterprise feel like a History Channel recreation tweaked in post.

Despite all the misgivings, i found the experience to be mildly diverting. However, my generally positive feeling as the film ended was stepped on by a terrible CGI landscape and voiceover declaring that “they were magnificent. OH, SO IT WAS THE SEVEN HEROES WHO WERE MAGNIFICENT! Thank you movie for explaining that.