From the moment he flashes a shit-eating grin at a man on the gallows, Samuel L Jackson makes a fine western antagonist here, if not quite rising to the heights of his blanket-blackmail sex act in The Hateful Eight. The fellow about to swing is Isaac Broadway (Tim Daly), who manages to communicate to his onlooking son Henry (Brandon Lessard) that he should seek revenge on one Sheriff Butler, who framed him for murder. But when Henry corners a different lawman, Gabriel Dove (Pierce Brosnan), in a church in the Montana town of Trinity, he learns that someone got to the previous sheriff first.
It turns out that papa Broadway, a maligned patriarch who built most of Trinity, was embroiled in a stolen Confederate gold racket – ripping off his gallows tormentor, the ex-slave St Christopher (Jackson), in the process. Add to that a Blackfoot seeking revenge (The New World’s Q’orianka Kilcher), a fake priest (David Arquette), a smattering of local thugs, and before you can say “sins of the father” (luckily, someone does), we have a bubbling potboiler on the go.
While The Unholy Trinity is always robustly enjoyable, director Richard Gray and writer Lee Zachariah aren’t the best at laying out their convoluted screed. Not only does it feel as if Henry and Gabriel are always skulking around the peripheries of their own story without clear agendas, it never settles down for long enough to hit on the emotional core of this homecoming. Forced into cahoots as they try to locate the gold and fend off the loitering St Christopher, it is only near the end that the childless sheriff and prodigal son start to bond – and the theme of surrogate family belatedly flares up.
The muddy psychology shows in some diffident directing from Gray when handling quieter scenes; he is more at ease in brothel shootouts and the gallops across ravishing Montana prairies. The impressively arrayed cast also help to keep this enterprise buoyant, even if a silver-haired and affable Brosnan and Jackson, effortlessly mesmerising a saloon full of punters, are doing exactly what you would expect. If following The Unholy Trinity’s various tracks is sometimes frustrating, it’s still rare enough: a red-blooded and essentially satisfying western.
• The Unholy Trinity is on digital platforms now and available on DVD from 21 July.
