The Unholy Trinity

No real moviegoing musings to go with this one, other than it ain't bad, but is only hanging around Boston Common through Thursday afternoon, although it continues at the Liberty Tree Mall after that. Kind of got a pretty nice direct-to-video cast, and, man, someone in Montana must be offering people good money to shoot westerns there. I feel like I've seen credits for "Yellowstone Western Town" on a lot, enough to make me wonder if Trinity is the same town I saw in 1923.


The Unholy Trinity

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2025 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime pre-order link for pre-order), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

I almost feel a little sorry for Brandon Lessard, who plays the nominal protagonist of The Unholy Trinity and seems to have spent half of his young career as an actor so far in Montana-shot westerns. He's got the role at the center of the movie and he's not really a leading man, but on top of that, Samuel L. Jackson and Pierce Brosnan have shown up on set with an appetite for the scenery. You can more or less see him vanish as the film goes on, and maybe the movie isn't necessarily better for it, but it's more entertaining.

He plays Henry Broadway, a young man returning in 1888 to the Montana town of his birth from someplace back East to see his father Isaac (Tim Daly) before he is hanged, a preacher (David Arquette) urging repentance and confession during a busy afternoon of executions at the territorial prison. Isaac would have Henry kill Trinity's sheriff, who he says framed him for the murder of a Blackfoot couple, and a former slave lurking around the fort by the name of St. Christopher (Jackson) seems interested in helping. It turns out that the Sheriff in question is dead, though, allegedly killed by that couple's daughter Running Club (Q'orianka Kilcher), although new sheriff Gabriel Dove (Brosnan) is not particularly interested in lynching her the way the townspeople seem to want, and while he's out warning her, Henry get in trouble in town, rescued by St. Christopher, who reveals that he and Henry's father stole a bunch of Confederate gold during the war, but Isaac double-crossed him, and now he wants to know where the loot is.

That's a lot going on to start, and at times it feels like the filmmakers haven't quite figured out what kind of Western they're making: "The Unholy Trinity" has a spaghetti-western name and its opening moments give a fleeting impression of something gritty and full of nasty hypocrisies, but then Henry shows up and seems impossibly clean-cut despite some perfectly even five-o'clock shadow, refuses a couple whiskeys because he doesn't drink, acts awkward around a very sweet prostitute (Kartina Bowden), and really doesn't get the time to make one wonder if he's got the ability to be a cold-blooded killer before the script yanks that away. It spends the first act or so becoming the sort of cliché studio western that makes folks sneer at the genre despite not being that prevalent: A fairly clean town that feels like a standard set, characters that come off as unambiguously good or evil, and literal bars of gold to hunt down.

Pierce Brosnan can thrive a bit in this environment; his tousled silver hair makes him come off as a father figure who has learned a thing or two, and he's got the brogue cranked up to full power, so if Dove does seem to have anachronistically good attitudes toward the land's native people or making sure you get to the truth of a matter before stringing people up, he's making good use of the stereotype of a well-read Irishman with a gift of gab as effective as any pistol. The movie really starts to take off when Samuel L. Jackson gets to go full Samuel L. Jackson, getting the first of a few speeches that let him reel off his intentions and casually reveal himself as a dangerous man before saying he's got to get to ambushin'. It is enough fun to watch Jackson do his thing that we overlook how quick he is to kill, but there's always something simmering in him that makes the film more interesting than it might be: He's been a slave and been badly betrayed, but he's no hero, the cunning agent of chaos that this movie needs.

His scheming is what leads to most of the shootouts, which are strong, with plenty of bullets flying, but director Richard Gray and crew are pretty good at keeping track of everyone and everything, even with a mix of folks getting picked off with rifles, pistols, and fisticuffs. It's good, but not showy staging, and neither looking to be particularly gruesome nor feeling unreasonably sanitized. It also never looks particularly unlikely other than a few jumps Dove makes down inclines and from a second story window that I felt in my knees, which have twenty years less wear than Pierce Brosnan's.

Through all this, it's kind of interesting that Henry Broadway is there and sort of necessary for things to happen, but feels more like a catalyst than a protagonist, the kind of part where you can hopefully write "young Brandon Lessard holds his own with veterans Jackson & Brosnan)". That's not the case here, and the result is that the movie flounders for a while, at least until the old hands come in and assert control.