Review: 'The Unholy Trinity' is a Western that likes its shootouts but doesn't know what to do with its characters

The Western thriller “The Unholy Trinity” feels like the work of someone who thought it would be a good idea to make a Western, but didn’t have enough good ideas after that.

Director Richard Gray and screenwriter Lee Zachariah, both Australians, start with a prologue that would seem to set up the premise: A young man, Henry Broadway (Brandon Lessard), arrives at a prison in the Montana territory, 1888, just in time to say goodbye to his father, Isaac (Tim Daly), who is being hanged for murder he swears he didn’t do. The son promises to go to the town of Trinity and kill the sheriff, Saul Butler, who framed his father.

Henry arrives in Trinity, a tough town where trust doesn’t come easily, and finds the sheriff — and quickly finds out it’s not Saul Butler, who’s in the graveyard, but the new sheriff, Gabriel Dove (Pierce Brosnan). Dove defuses the situation quickly, sets Henry up in the local hotel on the condition that Henry leave town in the morning.

Before morning comes, Henry gets tangled up in a couple more murders, of two brothers (Beau Knapp and Tim Montana) and a prostitute (Katrina Bowden). Henry didn’t kill them – one of the brothers got his throat slit by a mysterious benefactor who calls himself St. Christopher. He’s played by Samuel L. Jackson, who gives whatever wit and spark this muddled movie has.

St. Christopher is after something — which he explains by and by — and he’s happy to cause chaos in Trinity if it suits his purpose. He finds it advantageous to fan the flames of racist dissent when one of the town business leaders, Gideon (Gianni Capaldi), demands that Dove go after a Blackfoot woman, Running Cub (Q’orinank Kilcher), accused of killing the former sheriff.

Gray stages a series of gun fights that carry a certain frenetic energy, but he films them so haphazardly that they lose any sense of coherence. And the performances of “The Unholy Trinity” are thrown out of balance by Jackson, who’s so fascinating he makes everyone else feel like dead weight. 

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‘The Unholy Trinity’

★★

Opens Friday, June 13, in theaters. Rated R for violence, language and some sexual material. Running time: 94 minutes.