THE UNHOLY TRINITY - Mark Reviews Movies

The Unholy Trinity, Saban Films / Roadside Attractions

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 12, 2025

Things don't add up in The Unholy Trinity, a Western with some ambition and at least two intriguing characters. Lee Zachariah's screenplay seems uncertain where to aim those goals and makes the unfortunate decision to revolve around a third, far duller character.

That young man is Henry Broadway (Brandon Lessard), who's introduced arriving at a prison to witness the execution by hanging of his long-absent father (played by Tim Daly). The father doesn't have much time or desire to say too much before his death, but he does quickly catch up with his son, making sure he knows that his father was framed for the crimes that are leading to his death by the Sheriff of a town called Trinity. Henry already knew that, but it is terribly considerate when a character only appearing in an extraneous prologue uses his final confession to inform the audience of the story's premise.

Well, it's one part of the premise, at least. The other parts involve the apparent double meaning of the title, in that the story is also about the corrupt past of the eponymous town and the dealings of the two other characters who make up the also-eponymous trio. They're St. Christopher (Samuel L. Jackson), a man who also goes to see the elder Broadway hang and offers a wicked smirk when the condemned man spots him just before the gallows' trapdoor opens, and Gabriel (Pierce Brosnan), the current Sheriff of Trinity.

It's important to note that Gabriel isn't the aforementioned Sheriff, however, which leads to one of a few scenes that cuts right to the heart of who the man is. Gabriel, by the way, is one of the pair of worthy characters in director Richard Gray's movie—a soft-spoken man with a devotion to justice that doesn't always sit right with the population of this town. When Henry shows up and follows Gabriel into the church to avenge his dead father, Gabriel ends up talking him out of an easy kill, even without telling the stranger that he is woefully misinformed about the identity of the man at whom he's pointing a pistol.

The Sheriff Henry is looking for is dead, and as he was a beloved founder of the town along with the new arrival's father, no one believes the deceased lawman could have framed someone. Gabriel has a nice little speech about heroes and villains, the way the perception of others is often divided on the issue (The town, he points out, is presently split in their opinion of him), and how it's best that this young man doesn't find himself on the wrong side of that line. There's a refreshing pragmatism to this character, and Brosnan has such a unique way of being both effortlessly charming and bluntly direct that his presence immediately elevates what seems to be a fairly routine Western tale.

However, Gabriel ends up spending much of the story doing his own business. It involves a hunt for Running Club (Q'orianka Kilcher), a Native American woman whom a vocal and vengeance-seeking part of the town believe to have killed the old Sheriff, and his absence from the main plot has the opposite effect of his introduction. It's almost as if Zachariah, after creating such a worthwhile character, couldn't figure out how to truly incorporate him into Howard's story or didn't have the heart to do away with Gabriel entirely. It's easy to understand the latter.

The central plot, though, has Henry wrongfully accused of murdering three people the night of his arrival in Trinity and hours before he has agreed to leave the town. That development leads a lot of people, including Gabriel—who's convinced the newcomer is innocent—on occasion, to hunt for Henry and for the fugitive to form a tenuous alliance with Christopher. It's ultimately an incredibly convoluted way for plenty of standoffs and showdowns and gunfights in and around the town, because now there are two separate gangs searching for two wrongly accused characters, in addition to whatever Christopher is up to in following Henry to Trinity.

Christopher, of course, is other character of note here—a formerly enslaved man who has had nothing but trouble, with some of it of his own making and poor associations, since becoming free. Jackson doesn't play him as the villain he kind of is in this story, since we do have Gabriel's monologue as a guide to the movie's gray-area morality. Just as with Gabriel, every scene of Christopher charming and cunning his way through his goal of finding some hidden gold only serves as a reminder that the movie's choice of protagonist seems repeatedly and constantly misguided.

What, after all, is there to Henry, beyond being caught up in things beyond his understanding and a passive presence in the affairs of two much stronger characters? The plot of The Unholy Trinity might be too busy for its own good, but perhaps, that's also a side effect of a screenplay that doesn't have a suitable character at its center.

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