Pierce Brosnan, Samuel L. Jackson Western

Going way, way back, at least to The Great Train Robbery in 1903, the western remains one of cinema’s oldest genres — and certainly the one where it feels like everything’s already been done.

It’s therefore all-the-more disappointing when a brand new western, like Richard Gray’s gunslinging geezer flick The Unholy Trinity, brings nothing original to the table, rehashing movies we’ve seen before and doing it in a way that feels altogether generic.

At best, this serviceable shoot-‘em-up features solid turns by veterans Pierce Brosnan and Samuel L. Jackson — the latter sporting a formidable pair of graying mutton chops. But the seasoned duo can only do so much to salvage a convoluted and formulaic scenario involving bloody vendettas, double crossings, stolen gold bars and lots of boilerplate dialogue, all of it set against a rather stunning Montana backdrop.

The film’s one distinguishing selling point could have been the age of its two headliners: Brosnan is 72 and Jackson is 76. But the script by Lee Zachariah barely makes references to the senior status of either actor, who seem to be playing characters 20 to 30 years younger. In one late scene, Brosnan’s Sheriff Dove leaps off a rooftop and somehow lands unscathed on his feet, whereas you’d think he’d immediately be carted off for knee surgery. Not that a movie should be ageist about such things, but at least it should be realistic.

The Unholy Trinity’s plot actually revolves around a much younger man, Henry Broadway (Brandon Lessard), who witnesses the hanging of his father (Tim Daly) in the opening scene and swears to enact vengeance us soon as possible. Naïve and way too passive, he unwillingly shows up in picturesque Trinity, MT, to shoot down the corrupt sheriff his dad held responsible, only to find that the man is already dead and buried. Dove introduces himself as the cool new boss in town and smoothly deters Broadway from turning the place into the OK Corral — that is, for the time being.

Meanwhile, a crooked wayfarer named St. Christophe (Jackson) is hot on Broadway’s trail, catching up with the young man and revealing that his dead dad wasn’t, in fact, a stand-up guy. He was a conman who stole a treasure chest of gold that’s buried somewhere in the town he helped to build.

Many more shady dudes show up, including a roughrider (Gianni Gapaldi) seeking to avenge the sheriff, who he believes was killed by an indigenous girl (Q’orianka Kilcher) hiding out in the surrounding hills; a gang of bandits who get in a shootout with Broadway at the local brothel, killing a sex worker (Katrina Bowden) and orphaning her child; and David Arquette, who is supposed to be playing some kind of fraudulent priest, though the character doesn’t live long enough to make an impression.

The filmmakers pile on the incidents and acts of violence, and yet not a single scene manages to stand out. Westerns are like cinema’s version of Renaissance paintings: They all depict the same three or four things; the art is in how you depict them. But Gray offers nothing new or distinctive, borrowing from modern classics like Unforgiven while failing to add his own personal take.

It doesn’t help that the dialogue feels like it was written by a large language model, repeating clichés we’ve heard a hundred times before. When lines like “Seems like there ain’t no law around here no more…” or “What you want is not justice, it’s blood” are delivered without a shred of irony, you start wondering what decade the movie was made in.

Brosnan and Jackson at least add some spice to the familiar sauce — the former speaking in his native Irish brogue, the latter with his characteristic deadpan twang. The rest of the cast is uneven, with certain scenes played poorly enough to evoke parody.

As a director, Gray seems sincere in trying to bring back the standard western formula, both in this movie and his previous feature, Murder at Yellowstone City (unreleased theatrically in the U.S.). But he will need to seriously step up his game if he wants to hook viewers on a genre that, thanks to Taylor Sheridan, has recently seen a revival on streaming but has yet to find an audience on the big screen it was originally created for.

To his credit, Gray (who also executive produced the ill-fated Alec Baldwin western, Rust) milks the Montana locations for all they’re worth, framing nearly every outdoor scene against a daunting landscape of steep mountains and endless sky. Cinematographer Thomas Scott Stanton and production designer Tessla Hastings both make worthy contributions to a tech package that only mildly compensates for the director’s lackluster attempt to bring out the old guns and fire away.