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.

Review: 'The Phoenician Scheme' adds some melancholy, and Benicio Del Toro's charm, to Wes Anderson's patented whimsy

At their best, the movies of director Wes Anderson are like Russian nesting dolls, where one narrative sits inside another and another — like with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” or his Roald Dahl shorts. 

Anderson’s latest, the sublime and slightly melancholy “The Phoenician Scheme,” is more like a train set, a string of interlocking mini-narratives lined up like boxcars, each adding nuance to what went before. The locomotive for this particular train, the one who powers it all, is actor Benicio Del Toro.

Del Toro plays Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda, an industrialist and arms dealer, circa 1950, who we meet as he is in the midst of his sixth plane crash — which, like the others, was an assassination attempt. Violence is an old companion to Korda, who casually offers hand grenades to his guests like they were hand towels.

Knowing his enemies won’t stop coming at him, Korda decides he needs to groom his heir. He passes over his nine sons, who live in his sprawling mansion and have a talent for violence, and chooses his only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton). Liesl has no interest in her father’s fortune, as she is a novice working towards a life as a nun.

Korda enlists Liesl — as well as Bjørn (Michael Cera), a tutor who becomes an assistant — to finish his latest and greatest business scheme, overhauling the infrastructure of Phoenicia. (If you know Phoenicia is a region in what’s now Lebanon and Syria that hasn’t existed since shortly before the birth of Christ, congratulations. You’re smart, and this information will not help at all while watching this movie.)

There are multiple parts to this scheme, and each part forms an episode in Anderson’s script (he shares story credit with Roman Coppola, a frequent collaborator). Each part involves rewriting some previous deal with one of his investors, to cover a “gap” in his funding. And each trading partner has reason to be suspicious or vengeful toward Korda.

The trading partners and the other characters Korda encounters are, true to Anderson’s style, played by an array of famous faces, a list that includes Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright and Scarlett Johansson. Korda also is dealing with Excalibur (Rupert Friend), a government agent on orders to disrupt Korda’s scheme, and his half-brother Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who has some schemes of his own.

Korda is also contemplating mortality — multiple assassination attempts will do that — and has moments where he imagines the afterlife. Heaven is populated with such folks as Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham and, in an amazing instance of typecasting, Bill Murray as God.

Del Toro has worked with Anderson before, on “The French Dispatch,” and seems to run on the same wavelength, capturing both Anderson’s offbeat humor and his wistful worldview. In admiring Del Toro’s top-tier performance, though, don’t neglect giving praise to young Threapleton, who keys in on Anderson’s deadpan dialogue style as if it’s her first language. (If Threapleton looks like someone you’ve seen before, ht helps to know that she’s the daughter of Kate Winslet, who came close to working with Anderson on “The French Dispatch,” and should try again to make that connection happen.)

“The Phoenician Scheme” is a lot to take in, as Anderson’s dense plotting and rapid-fire dialogue deliver a lot of information all at once. Best to let it wash over you, and get caught up in the whimsical absurdity and humane undertone that Anderson brings to his films.

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‘The Phoenician Scheme’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 6, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, some sexual material, nude images, and smoking throughout.  Running time: 101 minutes.

Review: 'Ballerina' cuts through the 'John Wick' mythology to give Ana de Armas an action-movie character of her own

The main problem with the “John Wick” franchise is its mythology — a problem that started when the filmmakers decided it needed to have one. Why can’t we just have an anti-hero who shoots, stabs, slices and punches his way through hundreds of hired killers and leave it at that?

That problem, the mythology, threatens to choke the life out of the first “John Wick” spinoff movie, “Ballerina” — but, thankfully, the mayhem is entertaining enough, in a movie that gets a fair share of mileage out of the charms of star Ana de Armas.

The mythology here starts with the backstory of the prologue. De Armas’ character, Eve, is introduced to us as a young girl (played by Victoria Comte), living in a beachside mansion with her father, Javier (David Castañeda). Then armed commandos swarm the place, at the behest of a crime lord, The Chancellor (David Byrne), who wants to punish Javier for trying to escape his cult-like community. Javier fends off the bad guys but dies in the process, leaving Eve an orphan.

Someone takes an interest in young Eve: Mr. Winston (Ian McShane), who fans of the franchise know as Wick’s protector and the manager of the New York branch of The Continental, the shadowy chain of luxury hotels that is safe haven for criminals around the world. Winston offers young Eve his services, whenever she should ask.

Eve lands in a training school for future assassins. She practices her ballet until her feet bleed, and also learns martial arts, weapons and other deadly skills. The school’s leader, known as The Director (Anjelica Huston), gives Eve her first contract — which is how she runs into some of the killers associated with The Chancellor’s cult.

(For those paying attention to the details of the franchise, Huston’s presence sets this story within the timeline of the third “John Wick” movie, “Parabellum.” This means that Keanu Reeves’ Wick is still alive — he wasn’t looking to good by the end of the fourth movie — and available for an appearance here somewhere.)

Eve wants to chase after The Chancellor’s goons, but The Director won’t allow it. If someone from her tribe tried to kill The Chancellor’s assassins, the fragile peace between both sides would be shattered. But Eve is determined, so she asks Winston for information — which sets up the last half of the movie.

Director Len Wiseman manages not to gum up the action too much — which means he’s improving from when he directed “Underworld” and the “Total Recall” remake. The real credit should go to the stunt team, a factor that has put the “Wick” movies ahead of the pack, and to de Armas, who throws herself into the fight scenes with an admirable recklessness. 

De Armas’ efforts hit their peak in the movie’s extended climax, set in a mountainside village where seemingly every citizen — down to the local barista — has lethal talents and is happy to display them. If moviegoers have to endure some mythology to get to a scene with dueling flamethrowers, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

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‘Ballerina’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong/bloody violence throughout, and language. Running time: 125 minutes.

Review: 'Dangerous Animals' is a grindhouse movie with flair, topped by a devilish Jai Courtney, a strong turn by Hassie Harrison, and lots of sharks

I didn’t realize how much I missed seeing a well-made grindhouse movie — a B-movie horror movie with finely crafted twists — until director Sean Byrne threw one in my lap with “Dangerous Animals.”

Byrne, an Australian filmmaker directing his third film after “The Loved Ones” (2009) and “The Devil’s Candy” (2015), seems to understand that the most important elements to an effective psycho-killer movie are an appropriately nasty killer with a solid m.o. and a smart hero or heroine using their wits and courage to survive the carnage. 

The killer here is Tucker, played by the Australian actor Jai Courtney. He’s a burly guy running a tour boat out of Gold Coast, Queensland, taking the tourists out to see the sharks circling. What those tourists don’t know, until it’s too late, is that his kink is killing those tourists by feeding them to those sharks. There are more details to his pattern, but it’s better not to know too much ahead of time.

Tucker’s would-be victim is Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), an American surfer living out of her van. We learn early on that she’s had a rough life — an orphan who lived in a series of foster homes — and has a touch of the con artist. Zephyr doesn’t trust easily, which is why she surprises herself when she meets a nice guy, Moses (Josh Heuston), and they almost immediately make love in the back of her van.

Zephyr leaves Moses behind to catch the waves before dawn, which is when Tucker kidnaps her and holds her captive, handcuffed to a metal cot in a lower deck of his boat — alongside Heather (Ella Newton), a future victim Byrne and rookie screenwriter Nick Lepard introduced in the movie’s prologue.

The bulk of this tight thriller happens on Tucker’s boat, as Zephyr tries to outwit him, exploit the holes in his murderous process and stay alive long enough to see it through. It’s always surprising, sometimes unsettling and ultimately rewarding.

The extra strength of “Dangerous Animals” is the back-and-forth between its stars. Harrison, who played the ranch hand Laramie on three seasons of “Yellowstone,” is a Final Girl for the ages, making Zephyr’s fear and resolve feel entirely earned. Courtney has always been one of those guys who never quite jelled as an action hero — his misfires include “Suicide Squad,” “A Good Day to Die Hard” and “Terminator Genisys” — but is shockingly good as a full-out maniac.  

Oh, and yes, the sharks — whether real, mechanical or computer-generated — are really cool. What more could you want in a shark-driven serial-killer movie?

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‘Dangerous Animals”

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 6, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violent content/grisly images, sexuality, language and brief drug use. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Mountainhead' is a crisp satire by the creator of 'Succession,' about tech bros on the edge of chaos

I’m not going to divulge too much about what happens in the deliciously dark comedy “Mountainhead,” and not because HBO asked critics not to — and provided a detailed list of plot points not to spoil.

I’m going to keep my trap shut, beyond the basic set-up, because the movie is a fascinating and entertaining artifact of biting satire in the year 2025, an age when billionaires don’t mind being caught talking casually about taking over the world or moving off of it.

Writer-director Jesse Armstrong, making his first feature film and his first project since wrapping up the Emmy-winning series “Succession,” sets the entire story in a ridiculously opulent mountainside mansion during a winter ski weekend. (The movie was filmed in Utah, mainly in a house near Park City that listed last year for $65 million.) The house’s half-billionaire owner, Souper (Jason Schwartzman), has invited three super-rich friends for a poker weekend, where the guys can hang out, nosh on endless plates of snacks, and not talk business. “No deals, no meals, no high heels” is the guys’ mantra.

Souper does have something he’d like to sell his billionaire buddies — a wellness app that he thinks can make up for some of the stressful toxic sludge the rest of the internet is distributing.

Some of that sludge is courtesy of Venis (pronounced like “Venice, and played by Cory Michael Smith), owner of a global social-media platform, for which he’s just introduced new web tools that make disinformation and deepfakes easier to create and harder to detect. Venis is the world’s richest man, we’re told, but it isn’t exactly improving his life.

Also on this trip are Randall (Steve Carell), the elder statesman of the group, who’s holding back some bad personal news, and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who’s Venis’ longtime friend and current nemesis — because Jeff won’t sell to Venis a new A.I. program that will do everything Venis’ platform will do, without all the evil parts.

Soon after settling in at the house, all four men look at their phones, which are blowing up. News reports come in of unrest around the globe, some of it caused by the deepfakes generated by Venis’ new products. Hundreds are dying, cities are burning, and both markets and governments are jittery.

As the news comes in, our tech bros shift with alarming speed from denial — this can’t be our technology causing this, can it? — to bargaining, as they start considering how they can leverage this global chaos to their own advantage. 

Just as “Succession” used the real-life Murdoch family as an allegorical starting point, one can look at the characters in “Mountainhead” in terms of nonfiction counterpart. Smith’s Venis is the easiest one to peg; his obscene bank balance and his fascination with finding a new planet both evoke Elon Musk. Carell’s Randall could be the weekend’s Bill Gates, comfortable with his wealth but thinking beyond it. Youssef’s Jeff and Schwartzman’s Souper are the yin and yang of that generation of technology — one inventing something and only dimly seeing its value, the other a hustler who wants to sell things people don’t want.

Armstrong’s dialogue is as fresh and as crisp as the first ski trails through new powder. He wrote the script early this year, and put the production into a fast pace — five months from first words on page to releasing it on HBO and Max — to keep the observations about the tech industry’s rewiring of human life to a dull roar.

All four actors are on their game, and one gets the feeling Armstrong challenged them to keep the number of takes down and the length of scenes growing. There’s a nervous familiarity in the performances, as if these tech giants are of suspicious of their industry as the mortals not on Mount Olympus trying to use their products. The four of them make “Mountainhead” something worth streaming the next time you’re hanging out with your buddies, contemplating how the world will destroy itself.

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‘Mountainhead’

★★★1/2

Debuts Saturday, May 31, on HBO, then streaming on Max (soon to be HBO Max again). Rated TV-MA for language and sexual dialogue. Running time: 108 minutes.

Review: 'Bring Her Back' is a smart and creepy bit of terror, anchored by Sally Hawkins' unsettling turn as a foster mum

The veil between this life and the next is tattered and not well guarded — and it’s a divide that Australian filmmaking brothers Danny and Michael Phillippou like to poke with a sharp stick, both in their debut “Talk to Me” and now in their equally unsettling horror thriller “Bring Her Back.”

Two half-siblings — high-schooler Andy (Billy Barratt) and 8th-grader Piper (Sora Wong) — are trying to hang together after the sudden death of their father, who passed out in the shower and fell through the glass shower stall. Now they’re trying out a foster parent, Laura (played by the great Sally Hawkins), and hoping child protective services doesn’t split them up. 

Piper is visually impaired; it’s explained early that she can see shapes and brightness, but that’s all. (Wong also is visually impaired, and her performance shows that the Phillippous can count amazing luck in casting among their skill set.) 

As Andy and Piper try to settle in, something feels off about Laura and her house. Maybe it’s how eager Laura is to please. Or it’s her fascination with Piper’s visual impairment, which Laura says matches that of her late daughter. Or maybe it’s Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), a mute boy also living with Laura — but who gets treated radically differently than Andy and Piper do.

That’s as far as I dare take the synopsis, because I don’t want you to go in knowing too much and because I don’t think you’d believe me anyway. Some shocks can’t be described, only lived through.

What’s not shocking, but is disturbing, is how good Hawkins is as Laura, as she rides the edge of madness in ways that will terrify and make a viewer care. Is Laura crazy? Or are the circumstances around her what’s off the rails? Anticipating that answer is part of what makes “Bring Her Back” so tension-inducing and brilliant.

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‘Bring Her Back’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 30, in theaters. Rated R for strong disturbing bloody violent content, some grisly images, graphic nudity, underage drinking and language. Running time: 99 minutes.

Review: 'Karate Kid: Legends' brings together two threads of the franchise — Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio — and can't find interesting ways to use either of them

The test of a legacy sequel is when the current caretakers of the franchise try to figure out how to connect back to the original — and in “Karate Kid: Legends,” the fifth movie in the franchise, they make a complete shambles of the effort.

The effort begins with a prologue that begins with footage taken from the 1986 movie “The Karate Kid Part II,” when young Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) hears a story from his teacher, Mr. Miyagi (the late Noriyuki “Pat” Morita). The story involves a Miyagi ancestor who ended up in China, and learned kung fu from someone named Han — and how, together, they melded their martial-arts styles. “Two branches, one tree,” Mr. Miyagi tells young Daniel.

The story then shifts to the present day, in Beijing, where this century’s Mr. Han, played by Jackie Chan, is running his family’s kung fu school. His most promising student is Li Fong (Ben Wang), who’s leaving China with his mom (Ming-Na Wen), a doctor who has lined up a job in New York City. Mom disapproves of Li studying kung fu, and has made her son promise that he won’t fight ever again — for reasons that are explained later, and involve Li’s now-absent older brother, Bo (Yankei Ge). 

Li works to fit in at his New York school, and actually finds a friend in Mia (Sadie Stanley), whose father, Victor (Joshua Jackson), is an ex-boxer who runs a pizzeria. However, Li runs into Mia’s ex-boyfriend, the bullying Conor (Aramis Knight), who studies karate at a dojo run by O’Shea (Tim Rozon), who also happens to be the loan shark to whom Victor owes some money. 

Conor, we’re told, is the toughest karate fighter in New York — and the two-time defending champ of a tournament called “The 5 Boroughs.” From the moment this tournament is mentioned, any member of the audience can chart out the steps that end with Li and Conor facing each other in that tournament’s final match.

First-time feature director Jonathan Entwistle — who created the Netflix series “The End of the F***ing World” and “I Am Not Okay With This” — somehow manages to make a 94-minute movie feel tedious. Maybe it’s because the script (credited to Rob Lieber) feels hollowed out, as if entire sequences that would have explained things were removed and replaced with an endless string of lackluster montages. 

There are some small joys scattered through the film. Wang turns out to be a dynamic martial-arts performer, and one could imagine him taking on the kind of movies Chan made in his prime. And the inevitable team-up between’s Chan’s Mr. Han and Macchio’s Daniel generate some warm laughs, particularly when they debate the merits of kung fu and karate, using poor Li as a rag doll test subject.

It’s interesting to think about how “The Karate Kid,” a much-loved movie with some decent fight scenes and an Oscar-nominated performance by Morita, grew into a franchise with six movies and a fan-favorite TV series (“Cobra Kai”). Either audiences aren’t very demanding, or previous installments were better than this franchise filler.

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‘Karate Kid: Legends’

★★

Opens Friday, May 30, in theaters everywhere .Rated PG-13 for martial arts violence and some language. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' adds a French sensibility to the classic rom-com, fueled by the complex feelings for writing

One of the more outwardly funny things in the quietly humorous romantic comedy “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is that it takes a French filmmaker to show us how to pull something fresh and fun out of that most English of wits, Jane Austen. 

In writer-director Laura Piani’s lovely feature debut, Camille Rutherford plays Agathe Robinson, who works in a Paris bookstore — OK, the best-known Paris bookstore to American cinephiles, Shakespeare and Company (seen in “Before Sunset” and “Midnight in Paris,” among other movies). 

When we meet her, Agathe’s life is rather stuck. She’s a writer, but can’t get past the first few chapters of anything she’s working on. She hasn’t had sex in two years, though her flirty co-worker Felix (Pablo Pauly) gives her plenty of opportunities. She’s afraid to get into a car, because of an accident seven years before that killed her parents. She lives with her sister, Mona (Alice Butaud), and Mona’s 6-year-old son, Tom (Roman Angel).

Agathe’s fantasy life is quite lively, though. In one scene, Agatha is eating alone in a Japanese restaurant, and she looks in the bottom of her sake cup and sees a picture of a naked man. Then, suddenly, that naked man is walking to her table, and they dance in the restaurant.

Agathe is inspired to write about the naked sake man — and is shocked when she finds out that Felix sent those opening chapters to The Austen Residency in England, who have accepted her for a two-week writing fellowship. Felix eventually convinces Agathe to get in his car for the ride to the ferry terminal.

Across the channel, Agathe gets picked up by Oliver (Charles Anson), who identifies himself as the great-great-great-grandnephew of Jane Austen herself. He also tells Agathe that he teaches contemporary literature at a nearby college — and that he’s not a fan of his ancestor’s writing. Agathe takes a dislike to Oliver as quickly and as strongly as Elizabeth Bennet did for Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice.” And if you don’t know where this all leads, you don’t know Austen or you’ve never seen a romantic comedy.

Even though Piani is clear about the destination, the road map provides some engaging twists and turns. Much of that comes from the other writers enrolled in the fellowship, including a well-traveled poet (Annabelle Lengronne) and a strident feminist theorist (Lola Peploe).

Rutherford is a charming leading lady, who embodies Piani’s Austen-like predilection not to define her female character not solely in relation to the men sniffing around her. Agathe finds that the fear of the blank page and the fear of moving forward in her life are identical, and Rutherford embodies both with humor and heartache.

Piani shows herself to be a true Jane Austen fan, and in “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” proves the old writer’s adage that if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

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‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 30, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language, some sexual content and nudity. Running time: 98 minutes; in French with subtitles and English.