IN 1954, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made “The Seven Samurai”, which ran for more than 2½ hours in several Japanese-language editions and spawning 93 sequels, imitations and TV satires (now mostly irrelevant, with one exception).

In 1960, John Sturges released the first English-language version with a stellar cast led by Yul Brynner. In the annals of the Western genre, that version ranks very high, in my book right alongside “Shane”.

The eventual ranking of Antoine Fuqua’s 133-minute, 2016 version is unlikely to attain comparable heights. Its reputed production cost was $US90 million. Its plot is analogous to Kurosawa’s original. It’s visually spectacular. Five writers including Kurosawa get screenplay credits. The actors, led by Denzel Washington, do their best with the material.

Yet Fuqua’s film falls short of expectations. Perhaps I’m being unkind in that. Perhaps I’ve seen enough really great Westerns that have branded their cultural themes and values too deeply in my memory. But while it is undoubtedly a fiction, that doesn’t justify niggly little defects that diminish respect for its ancestry or an obtrusive musical score.

As the villainous Bogue who’s running the mining community of Rose Creek with an iron fist, Peter Sarsgaard’s performance meets the screenplay’s expectations. The names of two leading characters memorialise two pioneering cattle drovers – Washington playing Samuel

Chisholm, who blazed the Chisholm trail and Ethan Hawke as Goodnight Robicheaux, whose given name also memorialises the Goodnight-Loving droving trail and whose family name is the one given by James Lee Burke to the hero of several of his prize-winning contemporary crime novels.

The rest is a large, often noisy, often brutal, often corpse-ridden, pot-boiling actioner.

At all cinemas