When we think of Samuel L. Jackson, we think of films like “Pulp Fiction” and “Jackie Brown” and, if we’re being honest, “Snakes on a Plane.” He’s an explosive actor who knows exactly when to detonate, lulling the audience into a sense of false familiarity with an easy smile and knowing chuckle that fall away at just the right moment. Then his kindly eyes turn sharply devilish and he reveals a fury we never would have expected, no matter how many movies of his we’ve seen. He’s a master of the dramatic and tonal segue, an extreme shift that makes some actors look laughable.
Jackson is at his tricky, insidious best in Richard Gray’s “The Unholy Trinity.” Unfortunately it’s a mediocre western that doesn’t deserve him. I’m not sure it deserves his co-stars Pierce Brosnan and Q’orianka Kilcher either. They’re all trying to make a meal out of starvation rations. The cast’s efforts aren’t in vain, and the film is better for having them, but a thing can get a whole lot of “better” before it gets “good.”
“The Unholy Trinity” stars Brandon Lessard as Henry Broadway, the son of a convicted murderer who, at his hanging, loudly demands that his son kill the corrupt sheriff who framed him. And look, I know it was a different era, but I feel like that’s a weird time and place to plan first degree murder, since it’s literally in front of people who violently disapprove of that sort of thing.
I digress. Henry lugs his father’s ashes to the town of Trinity, Montana and immediately pulls a gun on Sheriff Gabriel Dove, played by Brosnan, who is significantly less plussed about that than I would be. Dove calmly walks Henry to the graveyard and reveals that the former sheriff — the one Henry is really mad at — is already dead. And with that, Henry ceases to be important for the rest of the film. Sure, he loses his innocence or whatever, and he accidentally blunders into a multiple homicide that sends him on the run, but it’s just not his movie anymore. Frankly, it never was.
Manipulating these events from the sidelines, like a diabolical trickster god, is St. Christopher, played with no small amount of glee by Jackson. He’s a former slave who got betrayed by Henry’s father, and searching for his share of — what else? — a bunch of stolen gold. So he’s sneaking around all the time, convincing the easily swayed sinners of Trinity to do his dirty work and making them think it’s all their idea. Honestly, most of them don’t deserve better treatment. It’s a complex role and Jackson runs away with it, grinning like a maniac because nobody’s smart enough to stop him.
A movie entirely about St. Christopher would have been fascinating. A movie about Sheriff Dove would have been reasonably satisfying as well. An Irish immigrant who is always at the edge of his patience — surrounded as he is by racist, violent fools — he’s been trying to prevent the townsfolk from lynching Running Cub (Q’orianka Kilcher), who they think killed their old sheriff. She’s also worth making a movie about. Come to think of it, that evil sheriff we never get to meet sounds pretty fascinating too.
Brosnan and Jackson and Kilcher draw our attention away from the blank slate that is the film’s actual protagonist, but “The Unholy Trinity” always comes back around to Henry eventually. It’s like watching a restaging of “Hamlet” where the director inexplicably thinks Reynaldo is the most important character and places him front and center in every other scene. And if you can’t remember which one Reynaldo was … congratulations, that’s my point.
There are moments when “The Unholy Trinity” works. The protagonist isn’t involved in any of them. Let Jackson cook, let Brosnan cool, let Kilcher kill. Their material isn’t exactly Shakespeare — a lot of it is hackneyed and tedious — but they captivate anyway, just by standing in front of the camera and letting their energy emanate. Brosnan still cuts a fine figure in an action sequence, eloquently navigating a battlefield. Kilcher can carry some serious dramatic weight. Jackson can cavort on the sidelines like Rumpelstiltskin getting high on karma.
But the story is middling. The themes are well-worn. The direction and camerawork top out at competent. “The Unholy Trinity” is welcomely overcast, like a shady midsummer California day, but that cast is fighting the material, which keeps trying to steer away from them for reasons I cannot fathom for the life of me. “The Unholy Trinity” is not a painful sit but it’s hardly a pleasure, and there’s no shortage of better westerns to watch, even in this day and age.
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