I saw Kevin Costner‘s Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 2 last Friday night (2.7) at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

For what it’s worth this 190-minute western feels a tad more engaging than Horizon: Chapter 1, which I caught in Cannes last May. But it’s more or less the same bowl of scenic, big-swing lethargy soup, and that ain’t cause for joyful celebration. I’m sorry but it’s just not.

Seven months ago (i.e., early last July) I wrote that unless Horizon 2 significantly improves upon the sprawling and sluggish initial installment and delivers something that feels whole and alluring and thematically fulfilling, he should probably forget about Parts 3 and 4.

Alas, Chapter 2 makes the same kind of mistakes that Chapter 1 did — it kinda moseys around and half-assedly hopscotches and fritters away story tension. Too damn slow, too clop-cloppy, almost zero urgency in terms making it all come together.

Chapter 2 is mostly about the women — it’s a rough-and-tumble film about open-range feminism. Sienna Miller‘s Frances Kittredge, Ella Hunt‘s Juliette Chesney, Isabelle Fuhrman‘s Diamond Kittredge, Abbey Lee‘s Marigold, Kathleen Quinlan‘s Annie Pine…but for God’s sake don’t ask me to recount their disparate storylines. I don’t want to think about them, talk about them, write about them…leave me alone. It’s taken too damn long to sit through these two films, and I’m damn sure not going to invest even more hours trying to neatly summarize them on the Macbook.

It really and truly breaks my heart to say all this. I love Costner as a man of character, consequence and sincerity, and I truly worship some of the films he’s directed and starred in. Open Range especially.

In my original Cannes review, I wrote that I was so bummed after seeing the first installment that “if a friend had offered a couple of snorts of Vietnamese heroin, I would have followed him right into the bathroom.”

Serious cinema in the classic western mode, especially when you’re talking about two movies running three hours each, is about delivering a solid, well-strategized, self-contained story with emotional currents. It needs to deliver a beginning, a middle and hopefully a bull’s-eye ending. Horizon Chapter 1 didn’t do that, and neither has Chapter 2. They both mainly plant seeds by introducing characters along with the beginnings or continuings of six or seven story lines. In so doing they refuse to deliver a serious, nutritional, stand-alone meal…the kind of thing most of us want to see.

Think of the huge, sprawling, emotional story that Red River told, and it did so in 133 minutes

Costner said last May that Horizon “is a journey…it’s not a plot movie.”