The dead giveaway that The West and the Ruthless is bad is the title. It’s nonsense. What does it even mean? And what does it communicate, other than “we think the word ‘ruthless’ sounds cool”?

This thing isn’t really a story so much as a jumble sale of Leone/Tarantino archetypes. You’ve got outlaws, a plantation owner named Winchester (yes, seriously), his wife Scarlet, their “last remaining slave” Mary, a pair of brothel owners, a half-Cherokee girl, and a pregnant woman—all crammed into a nonlinear, “Tarantino-ish” timeline that’s supposed to converge in a shootout. That’s literally the plot description on IMDB.

The problem? You need acting chops to pull that off. Instead, you get line readings so wooden they could qualify as reclaimed barn siding. There’s a scene where a shot pregnant woman goes into labor, and she delivers it with all the urgency of someone reading off a jar of marinara sauce.

There are “What the hell am I watching?” moments—though not in the good way. Like when the designated bad girl meets her dad in a brothel, immediately grabs a random man, and has noisy sex specifically so Dad can hear. She’s not a prostitute. She just… needed an orgasm with maximum parental awareness. I’m sure the writers thought this made her edgy. Mostly it makes you wonder why her father had to be part of the soundscape.

It’s also obvious this was cast for looks. A lot of men-appreciators will find eye candy here, but these guys are too pretty—like they’d refuse to settle west of the Mississippi without an acai bowl bar. And if you’re going to cast a handsome man, at least don’t make him irredeemable. Outside of the old runaway slave, every male character is a jerk, even the so-called “pimp with a heart of gold.”

The female runaway slave? She gets nothing but misery. Chained up and dumped roadside like trash. Harassed in the brothel. Barely written. Mostly she just stands around looking sad until she finally gets… a bath.

Husband-and-wife team Nick and Lexie Trivundza wrote and directed this thing. It’s their debut feature, shot at Old Tucson, the historic western backlot—which sounds impressive until you realize they somehow turned the Tombstone set into a charisma vacuum. I’d bet Lexie’s sensibilities guided most of it, because the whole movie feels pitched for a female gaze—and there’s nothing wrong with that. But my God, these are the most boring, personality-free himbos ever to put on cowboy hats.

And then there’s the box art. Right there on the DVD: “An Instant Indie Western Classic.” Which is bold talk for a movie with zero critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and festival laurels no one outside Arizona has heard of. When your marketing line sounds like something you wrote about yourself after a few glasses of wine, maybe it’s time to rework the pitch.

If this is an “instant classic,” then so is the chicken salad I forgot in the fridge two weeks ago—both are overstuffed, smell weird, and you’ll regret going near them.