Hold onto your butts! Samuel L. Jackson is back and as bad as ever in the trailer for The Unholy Trinity set for release on June 13th. He will star opposite former James Bond actor, Pierce Brosnan, in what looks to be a good, old-fashioned thrill ride on the western plains. The nearly three-minute preview of the summer release is chock-full of some great western genre tropes, so let's dig into what we can glean from it.
We've seen Jackson before in this genre when he starred as part of an ensemble cast in Quentin Tarantino's western, The Hateful Eight. However, getting Brosnan to bring his patented slick Scottish stylings to the wild west is something entirely new, and he looks more than capable in this setting. Bear in mind that it's not Brosnan's first venture into the realm of Westerns. He also starred in Seraphim Falls opposite Liam Neeson.
Written by Lee Zachariah and directed by Richard Gray, the pace of The Unholy Trinity is much more up-tempo and has an action movie vibe to it. Brosnan plays Gabriel Dove, a former robber who has become a no-nonsense type of sheriff in a small town. Jackson is perfectly cast as the mysterious and devilish St. Christopher; audiences will notice the recurring references to religious figures in the film. There is a lot of gold buried somewhere, and St. Christopher believes Henry Broadway (Brandon Lessard) knows where it is and that Sheriff Dove also knows where the stashed treasure can be found.
Jackson is always at his best when he is calculating and plotting, and he is doing plenty of it in the trailer. Fans can count on more of that from his character. The question is, just how involved Dove is and how exactly Broadway became the middleman between them. There is plenty of all the requisite Western devices with all manner of gunplay, men and women on horseback, and a really bad hombre that will test the morality and the intestinal fortitude of those who stand for the rule of law.
The unlikely combination of the two leads makes for a different twist as two of the best and most prolific actors of their generation square off against one another, and it's difficult to take sides considering their perspectives. The biggest question mark that will be answered in theaters is what kind of man Gabriel Dove is. With a shady background like his, how much fun will it be to watch a cackling Sam Jackson with Burnside muttonchops try and escape with a plot of buried gold?