The Magnificent Seven (2016) * *

Directed by:  Antoine Fuqua

Starring:  Denzel Washington, Haley Bennett, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, Byung Hun-Lee, Chris Pratt, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Peter Sarsgaard, Matt Bomer

The Magnificent Seven spends so much screen time gathering the troops, planning, and talking that there is little else to be excited about.     The setup and plot are simple enough and I was thinking we may have a Western masterwork like Tombstone on our hands.     Pure evil in the form of robber baron Bartholomew Bogue (Sarsgaard) viciously terrorizes a town near one of his mines and burns its church to the ground.     We know he needs to be dealt with in much the same savage fashion.    But, while Tombstone defines its characters by their actions and at a quick pace, The Magnificent Seven seems to be biding its time while our patience grows thin.    

After Bogue burns the church and promises to return in three weeks to terrorize the town residents into selling their land to him for pennies on the dollar, bounty hunter Sam Chisholm (Washington) arrives to carry out a warrant.    He dispatches his quarry and is soon offered a small sum by widow Emma Cullen (Bennett), whose husband was murdered by Bogue.     The money isn't much, but Chisholm is moved by her desire for vengeance and proceeds to gather up six other men to stand up to Bogue and his goons.

The movie stalls as we wait for Chisholm and his first recruit Faraday (Pratt), a wisecracking gambler, to find the rest of the guys who will comprise the titular group.     We meet Vasquez (Garcia-Rulfo), an outlaw/Chisholm quarry whom Chisholm promises not to pursue if he aids the cause.     Then, there is the pairing of Goodnight Robicheaux (Hawke), who travels with a deadly knife specialist (Hun-Lee), who is capable of cutting people in a way to make Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York envious.     The sixth member is Jack (D'Onofrio), a loony big guy described as "a bear dressed in human clothing".    The final member to round out the crew is a stray Native American named Red Harvest (Sensmeier), who is deadly with a bow and arrow and not so bad with a gun either.

Only Goodnight is assigned any depth.    He is a shell-shocked Civil War veteran reluctant to kill despite his abilities to do so.     He leaves after a heart-to-heart with Chisholm.     Training Day fans will recall Washington and Hawke's expert teaming in that Fuqua film.    It is good to see them together again.     But we kind of, sort of know he will be back in the nick of time to aid in the final showdown.     The final showdown with Bogue and his army is also a long letdown.    So much happens we never get a true sense of what exactly is going on.    It is a free-for-all, mostly because there are too many moving parts between Bogue's army, the townsfolk who assist the Seven, and the Seven themselves.     Even in chaos, we should still see an objective and a strategy, as in Saving Private Ryan, where bullets whiz by and bodies fall, but we still know our footing.

There are terrific actors here saddled with characters with little to them.    The actors try to infuse as much character as possible, but it is a tall order.     Sarsgaard plays a truly heinous villain to the tee.   He does his job, which is to make us root for his demise, but it is strange how much time he spends off-screen.    We miss him when he's gone.     Chisholm is as close to a moral center as the movie provides, since he is a "duly sworn officer of the court" as he puts it.    He only seems to own one outfit, which is an all-black number, and I hope he gets a chance to wash out during all of the movie's down time.     Haley Bennett is such a dead ringer for Jennifer Lawrence, I had to look up whether she is related to her or if Lawrence was doing an uncredited cameo.    She is not related to Lawrence by the way, but she still knows how to handle a gun like the boys can.  

What we have here is too much setup without much else.    The Magnificent Seven is a remake of the Yul Brynner 1960 Western (unseen by me), so I went in with a fresh perspective.     It runs over two hours and easily could've been more taut.    The movie ends with a tribute to the fallen members of the Seven, with the narrator dubbing them as "Magnificent", as if we needed to be reminded.     The movie falls significantly short of that term.