Pierce Brosnan trades licence to kill for sheriff's badge in revenge tale
The Unholy Trinity
★★★
MA (15+), 93 minutes
A Western starring Pierce Brosnan and Samuel L. Jackson promises to be a decent enough time, at the very least. And that is exactly what this revenge tale, with a significant (though far from obvious) Australian component, delivers – a decent enough time.
Absolutely nothing in The Unholy Trinity comes as a surprise. Almost everything feels like something you've seen or heard before ('they kilt ma brother', says one chap-wearing villain seconds after the saloon has fallen silent upon the entry of his posse).
Even the name echoes the Terence Hill-Bud Spencer Trinity films from the 1970s. But while there are some flashes of wry humour dotted throughout – can a movie with Jackson ever not have at least a little twinkle in its eye? – this is mostly a straight-shooting exercise in genre.
Not that it doesn't try to surprise with its convoluted revenge plot sprinkled with dollops of Civil War, slavery, indigenous land rights and religion.
Henry Broadway (Brandon Lessard) arrives at the gallows just in time to hear his father proclaim he is innocent of the crime for which he's about to swing. The true villain, he insists, is the sheriff of a town called Trinity.
Duly entrusted with a mission of vengeance, Henry rides to Trinity and pulls a gun on the lawman in church. Trouble is, it's the wrong sheriff; the man who killed his Pa is dead. In his place is Gabriel Dove (Brosnan), whose message is one of peace (nominal determinism, much?). That said, he's not averse to using a rifle to enforce it.
There's a faction in the town convinced that the old sheriff was murdered by a Blackfoot woman (Q'orianka Kilcher) who lives out in the wilds, and they want to hunt her down. Dove is convinced she's innocent, and does all he can to protect her.
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Like Garland did with his Civil War screenplay, there's been some dramatic upheavals in real-life that allow him to make some keen observations about us as a society with this script, knowing his audience have already survived their own infectious pandemic. He must have had a bunch of insights to share, because 28 Years Later is actually the first in a planned trilogy, the final instalment filmed back-to-back with this film and due out in cinemas just after Christmas. The performances are very strong and sometimes against type, like Jodie Comer's non-action film tragic figure, or Aaron Taylor-Johnson's very action-film approach. Danny Boyle and his crew do some fairly amazing technical work, including filming with an array of iPhones that give gorgeous crisp visuals and are carried in a lightweight frame specially designed to allow cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to follow his cast into tight spaces or up ladders and hills at a matching speed. 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Garland was quite prescient with last year's Civil War, a film he wrote and directed, with a message that felt just a few weeks ago, as citizens of Los Angeles had the National Guard called on them by their President, like it was a crystal ball into a likely future. In their first zombie film, England has been ground zero for an infection called Rage, passed on by bodily fluids - a sneeze, the saliva of a bite, a drop of blood - that turns its victims almost immediately into fast-moving killing machines that aren't zombies so much as carriers of an aggressive human form of distemper. We learn as the film opens that the rest of the world has written England off to keep the infection under control, the entire island a quarantine zone that no remaining human is allowed to leave, which is fairly Brexit-coded. 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Like Garland did with his Civil War screenplay, there's been some dramatic upheavals in real-life that allow him to make some keen observations about us as a society with this script, knowing his audience have already survived their own infectious pandemic. He must have had a bunch of insights to share, because 28 Years Later is actually the first in a planned trilogy, the final instalment filmed back-to-back with this film and due out in cinemas just after Christmas. The performances are very strong and sometimes against type, like Jodie Comer's non-action film tragic figure, or Aaron Taylor-Johnson's very action-film approach. Danny Boyle and his crew do some fairly amazing technical work, including filming with an array of iPhones that give gorgeous crisp visuals and are carried in a lightweight frame specially designed to allow cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to follow his cast into tight spaces or up ladders and hills at a matching speed. It really amps up the film's pull-your-legs-up-onto-the-seat-with-you terror.
