In this mess of a Western from director Richard Gray (Murder at Yellowstone City, Robert the Bruce), we’re told the story of a young man named Henry Broadway (Brandon Lessard), the estranged son of Isaac Broadway (Tim Daly), who is executed in prison in front of his son immediately after giving Henry an impossible task: to murder the man responsible for framing him for a crime he didn’t commit. To fulfill that promise, Henry must travel to the remote town of Trinity, a place filled with secrets, criminals, and possibly a buried treasure.
Set against the turbulent backdrop of 1870s Montana, The Unholy Trinity finds Pierce Brosnan as one of the few reputable people in town, Sheriff Gabriel Dove, who, along with Isaac Broadway, helped build Trinity years ago. Isaac was accused of murdering a prominent man in the community, and it is for that crime that Henry must prove his father’s innocence. On his journey, he meets a mysterious figure named St. Christopher (Samuel L. Jackson), whose expertise is playing both sides of the fence for his own gain; he’s also one of the few people around who knows exactly what (but not where) this treasure is. Others moving through Henry’s life in Trinity include a shady preacher (David Arquette), local villain Gideon (Gianni Capaldi) and his brothers, and the sheriff’s wife Sarah (Veronica Ferres).
It turns out that the sheriff is protecting the Native fugitive Running Club (Q’orianka Kilcher), who is also suspected of a murder she didn’t commit, but that hasn’t stopped Gideon from forming a posse from hunting her down. In other words, Trinity is a powder keg with multiple matches ready to light the fuse.
With so many characters and storylines, you’d expect The Unholy Trinity to be layered and complicated, but instead, it’s mostly just tedious and boring, even with the presence of powerhouse performers like Jackson and Brosnan to do the bulk of the heavy lifting. The two men play a cat-and-mouse game with each other that’s sometimes amusing, but when these moments are entangled with lessons about the town’s history that may or may not be true, and stories about Henry’s father whose truth is also questionable, after a while, I gave up trying to figure out reality from fiction, instead waiting for the bullets to fly, which they eventually do.
It doesn’t help that, as an actor, Lessard is a bit of a dud in the role as the young upstart who is more smoke than fire when it comes to getting his revenge. The film is slow, artless, and not an especially convincing or authentic Western adventure story or tale of redemption. It’s more an unholy mess than anything else.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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