THE STORY – Buried secrets of an 1870s Montana town spark violence when a young man returns to reclaim his legacy and is caught between a sheriff determined to maintain order and a mysterious stranger hell-bent on destroying it.
THE CAST – Brandon Lessard, Samuel L. Jackson, Pierce Brosnan, Veronica Ferres, Q’orianka Kilcher, Ethan Peck, Tim Daly & David Arquette
THE TEAM – Richard Gray (Director) & Lee Zachariah (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 95 Minutes
There’s no point in sugarcoating how bad Richard Gray’s “The Unholy Trinity” is. It’s a bore of a Western that only makes one question why they sat down to watch it within the first ten minutes of the longest ninety-plus minutes one could experience this year.
Audiences are placed in Montana in the 1870s as Henry Broadway (played by Brandon Lessard) is having the last conversation with his estranged father, the notorious criminal Issac Broadway, who impasses on him who framed him for a crime he did not commit. “The Unholy Trinity” wastes no time giving its lead protagonist a mission that leads him down an unfortunate series of events that is supposed to be considered entertaining by those who watch. Also, right off the bat, it establishes its visual style, which is only tough to look at most of the time. With color grading that drains the colors away from the Montana landscapes, the characters traverse throughout. There’s a moment in the first scene where Gray shoots the most standard conversation in a shot-reverse-shot order that features a brazenly terrible attempt at either pulling focus or implementing a fish-eye lens. While it may come off as an artistic choice rooted in what these characters are feeling in this moment, it frankly looks as if someone typed into Open AI to create what’s put on screen.
The rest of “The Unholy Trinity” still manages to look as stale as Henry eventually arrives in the small town of Trinity. There, he meets personalities like the larger-than-life opportunist St. Christopher (played by Samuel L. Jackson) with plans up his sleeve and the older, newly appointed Sheriff Gabriel Dove (Pierce Brosnan). Both aged gunmen have secrets of their own, pushing and pulling Henry in different directions, especially as he only digs himself further into trouble. Lee Zachariah’s screenplay propels its protagonist forward through a narrative that is both distracted and somehow equally unengaged with its own story. There are so many factors in play, whether it’s St. Gabriel is hunting down the missing gold that Henry’s father hid, the manhunt for Q’orianka Kilcher’s Running Club, who is the assumed killer of the former sheriff Saul Butler, and others who want to gun down Henry. Despite how interesting it sounds, all of this elicits nothing but boredom from viewers.
Part of it is due to Gray’s direction, which does little to showcase the admiration for the genre he’s been outspoken about. Every shootout is staged poorly, has no emotional weight behind any bullet fired, and plays out in a manner entirely expected by how simplistic this film is. The performances that Gray has to muster out of his actors are barely serviceable, not that it helps that each character is as riveting as watching paint dry. Jackson and Brosnan (mainly the latter) are making the most of this despite turning in work that is not even attempting to rise above the material given to them. Lessard, unfortunately, falls on the sword that Gray gives him, playing a protagonist who’s devoid of being remotely worthy of being a lead character in an action-heavy western. Every character is just every trope of the genre mixed into a blender filled with ingredients that have no identity of their own.
“The Unholy Trinity” is the worst type of straight-to-television feature that fails at everything it sets its sights on. Gray probably should’ve created a film that feels more inspired by his Australian roots. At least that possibly would have given a sense of originality to the project. Instead, he’s just taking the best of every aspect from any Western he’s seen and jamming it into a film that is a slog to get through. Jackson and Brosnan both have better things to do than something like this, which only comes off as a waste of their time.
