It’s as if the idea of the character as a deadly but elfin Asian man is more powerful than what the actor who’s been slotted into the part looks like. Turns out, Faraday’s right: Vasquez really is, as far as his development goes, just the movie’s Mexican.īilly Rocks is mystifyingly referred to as a “petite fella” by his bestie, the PTSD-shaken sharpshooter Goodnight Robicheaux, who’s played by Ethan Hawke, an actor at most an inch taller than Lee Byung-hun. Suicide Squad leaned heavily into stereotypes to fill in its characters - its Japanese woman wielded a katana and wore a mask patterned after her country’s flag, and its Latino man was a heavily tattooed gangbanger. The Magnificent Seven is quick-shooting, dynamite-blasting evidence that the filmmakers and executives behind it agree that onscreen diversity is important, but not that they understand that diversity might mean something more than simply having characters of color show up. As a sheer feat of casting, it feels like it deserves a salute - a $100ish million remake of a 1960 Western (itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1954 Seven Samurai) in which four of the titular seven aren’t white. The Magnificent Seven, like another recent ragtag-band-of-outsiders-saving-the-day movie, Suicide Squad, is an awkward milestone in Hollywood’s ongoing and urgent conversation about representation. The group’s stated function is to protect the small town of Rose Krick from a hammy evil industrialist named Bartholomew Bogue ( Peter Sarsgaard), but their stealth reason for being seems to be to allow for an array of faces so diverse on marketing materials they make the Fast & Furious franchise look like a Woody Allen movie. They’re eventually joined by Chinese knife-thrower Billy Rocks (played by Korean megastar Lee Byung-hun) and bow and arrow–wielding Comanche warrior Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier). The group’s leader, bounty hunter Chisolm ( Denzel Washington), is black. Vasquez, a wanted man recruited with the promise of one less bounty hunter on his tail, is, indeed, Mexican. But that line is less a racial quip than it is a statement of purpose for the movie. When Josh Faraday - the hard-drinking, hard-gambling gunslinger played by Chris Pratt in The Magnificent Seven - first lays eyes on Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), the newest addition to the team of mercenaries of the title, he hollers, “Oh good - we’ve got a Mexican!”įaraday is a cowboy variant on the lovable dirtbag that Pratt has made his specialty, the kind of guy with a heart of gold and the mouth of a man born two centuries too early to complain about political correctness on Facebook.

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