The Glorious Seven is a 2019 action thriller about an ex-military commander hired by a shady millionaire to rescue his wife, who was kidnapped by the leader of a guerrilla group.
After you sit through the opening credits of writer-director Harald Franklin‘s independent shoot ’em up The Glorious Seven, complete with a course cover of The Who‘s My Generation, you might wonder if some cosmic wrinkle in time suddenly wrinkled its way through your living room and whisked you back to the mid-1980s, specifically the B-movie action section of your local video rental store. It’s really the only explanation for what your next 90 minutes will feel like, the um, well, glorious cheese of this movie the stuff of either an accidental mashup by a movie maker just hoping to tell an oft-told story with some flair or the work of a maniacal genius who so keenly understands the art of parody, he raises the bar in making it so.
The story is wafer thin, that of a brutal money man named Anthony Levin (Fernando Carrera), living in the jungle-esque paradise of Nicaragua, who arrives home to find his home in disarray, bodyguards slaughtered and his lovely but troubled and abused wife Valentina (Julia Mulligan) kidnapped. Who did it? Well rebel leader (and recently broke out of prison chain gang) Javier Mendoza (Fernando Corral) of course, he and his cronies swarming the place for their valuable prize. In comes David Guerra (Jerry Kwarteng), an ex-special forces guy who is the “best in the business” for handling such things we’re told, hired by Levin to get Valentina back, putting together a crew of six others to start a war in saving the girl.
Did you ever see Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s 1993 action comedy Last Action Hero? Hopefully you did. Either way, at one point in that film, we meet a crime lord named Tony Vivaldi played by the legendary Anthony Quinn, and the reason I bring him up is because his brief screen time in that movie feels like a play on whatever Carrera is doing here, just you know, twenty-six years before it happened. What this means, I hope, is that Franklin is a fan of the very thing Quinn was poking fun at, that of low-rent direct-to-video action titles of the 80s and the over-the-top characters who chewed to pieces every shred of the scenery they were part of. Except everyone in The Glorious Seven is Anthony Quinn.
I don’t really care if anyone is to say this movie is meant to be taken seriously because in no way could anyone enjoy this better than to think it a satire and accept that every single person involved with The Glorious Seven came to set every day with their tongues firmly embedded in their cheeks. Trust me, with that understood, this becomes a minor miracle, dripping with bottom shelf chutzpah the likes you probably haven’t seen since, well, Schwarzenegger was running amok in jungle camps with a rocket launcher on his shoulder.
Dubbed in English (even though the actors are already speaking English – and another reason I’m convincing myself this is a legitimate spoof), The Glorious Seven is inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai (duh), something already worn to the nub. However, as Franklin might borrow his themes and title from that movie, it’s far more connected to those beefy gun-toting adventures from a few decades past, and if you’re longing for a lovingly crafted ribbing (or maybe homage) of such, you can’t go wrong with this, a bombastic, enterprising little flick that is fun in all the ways you surely won’t expect. You simply can’t look away.