This movie doesn’t quite live up to its title. Its central villain, played with typical brio by Samuel L. Jackson, commits many malfeasances but, like they say in that Renoir movie, he has his reasons. The sheriff, played by Pierce Brosnan, is named “Gabriel Dove,” for heaven’s sake, and he proves a right guy. Rounding out the three is Brandon Lessard, who’s so fresh-faced that, even with a beard and a big bruise on his cheek, he looks little like a convincing Old West avenger.
Arguably, that’s the point. His character, Henry Broadway, is first seen accompanying his old man, whom he’s only just met, to the gallows. Broadway Senior, played by Tim Daly, insists that the murder for which he is hanging was a frame-up, and instructs Henry to go to the town that his dad founded and clear the man’s name. Not having anything better to do with his time—there is also, we learn, a cache of gold involved—Henry hops to it, winding up in the Montana Territory, year 1888. There, he encounters a bit of a tangle; while his father is said to have built the town, he is despised there, and the rival who supposedly framed him, also now dead and buried, is revered.
As Henry tries to suss all this out, he proves himself no kind of gunfighter; amid a tryst, he shoots too late to effectively defend the ostensible honor of a kind local prostitute (Katrina Bowden). Soon, he’s torn between the sheriff and a mysterious outsider, Jackson’s character, who calls himself “Saint Christopher.” (Man, these character names are like something out of one of those 1930s film allegories made by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.) Sheriff Dove sympathizes with Henry’s situation, but advises, “We’ll see if it’s possible to have justice and leave a few hearts beating.”
Brosnan gets the best of screenwriter Lee Zachariah’s dialogue; in a gunfight against a guy called “Priest,” Henry notes, “I don’t think he’s a real priest,” and Dove replies, “Like a Lutheran?” (Dove is established as an Irish immigrant.) The remainder of the cast is made up of, if not big guns, at least medium-gauge stars, David Arquette and Q’orianka Kilcher among them. The movie’s not a barn-burner or future classic, but new Westerns are thin on the ground these days, and this ultimately is a better-than-decent one.
