The “Magnificent Seven” remake is good enough to wish it was better.

Basically, the 2016 version is about half as good as the 1960 version, which is half as good as its source material, Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic, “Seven Samurai.” Individual elements work, but it fails to be a cohesive, satisfying narrative.

Don’t worry though — a lot more people get shot. Like 250 fellas in cowboy hats shot dead. It’s the Old West meets modern-era Hollywood violence.

The movie entertains largely because of its three charismatic leads — Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke. Washington plays a bounty hunter recruited by a besieged town to fight a ruthless, gold-digging (Old West version) businessman played by Peter Sarsgaard.

Washington’s hero has a legitimate grudge with the baddie, while the other guys join the fight for mostly muddled, undeveloped reasons. The more you recognize the actor, the more backstory you get. Witty repartee and images of gorgeous Western landscapes fill the time around the gun-fighting, and the final half hour of the film erupts into a whirlwind of PG-13 shootouts (where people get shot in terrible places, but the blood doesn’t splatter).

Frankly, I don’t know how to fill out a traditional review of “The Magnificent Seven.” I love Westerns enough that this mediocre one entertained me enough in the moment. I can’t remember much about it now.

I’d rather fill the space wrapping my head around the logic of the bad guy’s plan. Sarsgaard’s character has a terrifically evil name, Bartholomew Bogue, and his approach to villainy also leans into flamboyancy.

Looking to take over a nearby gold mine, Bogue rides into Rose Creek with the idea of strong-arming the locals into selling property. He offers each of the landowners some money, but it’s apparently a ridiculously low-ball amount, so much so that some Old Timer whines about his land being worth at least three times that amount.

Bogue refuses to negotiate, and his men murder a few loose-lipped townies.

We’ve seen this sort of strategy in movies before — a tough guy utilizing hired muscle instead of offering fair compensation for land. Movie logic suggests paying a few rough necks to euthanize a town is always going to be cheaper than paying market price on land near a gold mine.

The problem in “Magnificent Seven,” however, is the presence of the Magnificent Seven. Halfway through the film, the heroes confront what at first looks to be a reasonable number of Bogue’s crew who are watching over Rose Creek. A gunfight erupts, and about 20 more guys come popping out of the saloon, general store (etc., etc.). By the time it’s done, the Magnificent Seven have conservatively murdered 25 goons.

Now 25 goons are probably still cheaper than paying market price on land, but any reasonable entrepreneur would be double-checking the ledger at this point. He might say, “Well, 25 goons were dern-good murdered without much effort, so maybe these seven fellas are not the trifling sort.”

“If 25 won’t do it, how many will?” he’d ask.

As the climax shows us, Bogue settles on a small army. It’s an absurd number of hombres attacking Rose Creek at the end. I didn’t keep an official tally, but it seems like way too many guys on the payroll.

I’ll give Bogue some credit — surely he knows not all these guys will be making it out alive, and therefore the final budget for this siege will be considerably less than promised. Still, at least some of these goons are asking for a signing bonus of some sort — you aren’t risking your life without a little taste of the payout.

And who’s to say you’ll even be able to collect the funds off the corpses at the end? Those goons, knowing they’ll be facing no less than the Magnificent Seven, probably needed a night of gambling and hard partying on a riverboat to blow off some steam, and a lot of that money is long gone, presumably in the hands of a Bret Maverick-type.

I don’t have full access to this Bogue guy’s finances. All I’m saying — maybe it’s better in the long run to pay market value on the land.

Sure, you’re going to have holdouts, and eventually you’ll need a few goons to drown those poor souls at the local watering hole. It’s a bit of a slow play, but a proper villain could frame those murders as unfortunate Old West accidents. You dump a bunch of rattlesnakes into the outhouse and you have complete deniability. Super-heroic men-for-hire aren’t going to notice Old Jed getting snapped on the buttocks by a rattler.

At the very least, Bogue should’ve sought a third-party adviser before making any rash decisions.

This line of thinking, by the way, isn’t what you want your audience members thinking about during your movie. And that’s about all I have to say about “The Magnificent Seven.”

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Tyler Wilson can be reached at [email protected].