I took the advantage of $5.00 movie day at the local cinema to see Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect from an espionage/action movie, down to the last trope, but I enjoyed it a lot.

My favorite bit was seeing Cobie Smulders‘ name in the opening credits, and before I could fully squee out, up came Aldis Hodge‘s name. Smulders is Maria Hill in the Marvel films, and Hodge was Alec Hardison in all five seasons of Leverage, and let’s just say I was far more excited to see those actors again than I was to see Tom Cruise¹.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back doesn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome, but I liked it, and I think fans of the first film will, too. As will fans of Smulders and Hodge, who kind of made the movie for me.

¹ I like Tom Cruise movies, and I enjoy his work in them. There are a lot of them, though, so my excitement gets spread a little thin. 

I’ve only seen parts of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and it’s been so long since I saw 1960’s Magnificent Seven that I can’t recall any of the particulars beyond the presence of Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen.

Contextually, then, I’m well suited to appreciate Antoine Fuqua’s Magnificent Seven for what it is, rather than for what it’s a remake of. I didn’t actually get around to seeing it until it had been out for a full month, but I’m glad I saw it in the theater. I really enjoyed myself (in part, perhaps because I was seeing it with my friend Alan.)

The film didn’t need that much help from good company. I loved the performances from Vincent D’Onofrio, Chris Pratt, and Haley Bennett, and I thrilled at pretty much every one of the scenes that establishes how deadly our heroes are. I also liked that they were each distinctly different, and not just in terms of diverse casting—they all dealt death in different ways.

In classical tragedy people are brought low by their flaws. Here, however, our heroes can die simply because there just aren’t enough good places to hide from the bullets¹. They can also die heroically, of course, and I won’t spoil who does what. I will, however, say that this remake does not improve the survival odds for the Seven².

In the final analysis, of course, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is a groundbreaking piece of cinema, while Fuqua’s Magnificent Seven is just a cool cowboy movie. Still, I liked it.

¹ I believe there were too many bullets. The Gatling Gun in use in the film used a 40-ish round box magazine, which required the gunner to stop firing and reload. The Model 1881 Gatling Gun’s “Bruce Feed” mechanism (which they did not use in the film) would have allowed for continuous fire of roughly 400 rounds per minute. And even that might not have been enough for all the bullets I saw.

² The survival percentages of our heroes are equally not great in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai³ and John Sturges Magnificent Seven⁴ . Both of them round up to 43%. 

³ “In the end we lost this battle too. The victory belongs to the farmers, not to us.”

⁴ “The Old Man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We’ll always lose.”

See Kubo and the Two Strings before it leaves theaters.

Please?

I don’t have any skin in the game here, but I feel like this film deserves more attention than it is getting.

I loved it. The artistry involved is absolutely stunning. Aside from being a really good story, told well, it happens to be unflinchingly beautiful. Like all stop-motion films, it was built frame by frame, and in this case the filmmakers took the opportunity to make every frame gorgeous. I think any still from this movie could be ink-jetted onto canvas and hung on my wall.

From a critical standpoint, I didn’t know what to expect, and I felt like our “inciting incident” came later than it should have. I suspect that’s just the weight of other films, and the indoctrination they’ve left on me.

Kubo and the Two Strings easily clears my Threshold of Awesome.