Producers: Randall Batinkoff, Brian Skiba, Laurie Love and Scott Reed   Director: Brian Skiba   Screenplay: Brian Skiba   Cast: Stephen Dorff, Heather Graham, Nicolas Cage, Randall Batinkoff, Cooper Barnes, Tzi Ma, Jeremy Kent Jackson, Costas Mandylor, Scarlet Stallone, William McNamara, Mohamed Karim, Bre Blair, Forrest Wilder, Forrie J. Smith, Laurie Love, Eric Mabius, Dan O’Brien, Mitchell Hoog and Ava Monroe Tadross   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: D–

Even the most devoted lovers of Westerns are advised to skip “Gunslingers,” a corpse-heavy but messy and unconvincing oater in which prolific writer-director Brian Skiba and star Stephen Dorff prove they’re as inept in providing period thrills as they were in fashioning modern ones in the recent “Clear Cut.” The sole modest compensation is yet another wacko performance from Nicolas Cage.

Set in the early twentieth century, the movie begins with a prologue in 1903 New York City (indicated by a cheesy outdoor process shot), where Thomas Keller (Dorff) kills a member of the Rockefeller clan in some unexplained contretemps; his brother Robert (Jeremy Kent Jackson) is set afire in the melee.

Thomas, fearing Rockefeller revenge, apparently leaves Robert behind to escape, for the action shifts to backwoods Kentucky in 1907, where he’s accosted by a bunch of bounty hunters, whom he kills with the same practiced gunplay he exhibited in New York.  Then he rides to a town called Redemption, where Jericho (Costas Mandylor) presides over a congregation of reformed reprobates who frequent a saloon called, for some inexplicable reason, the Domus de Sallust.  After being baptized by Jericho, he joins them, hanging up his guns and going through a compulsory fake hanging that’s documented by town photographer Ben (Nicolas Cage, decked out in a bowler hat and some glasses with square lenses and crucifixes inscribed on them) as his pseudo-grave joins those of the others.

Ben’s the weirdest of the group, of course—as the Bible-obsessed, gun-averse (until he straps on his holster again) fellow, Cage delivers one of his patented loony performances, offering much hand-shaking and delivering his lines in a raspy whisper that makes it hard to understand what he’s saying, which would be annoying if what he was saying were worth hearing. 

The others, despite efforts to be colorful, are dull by comparison.  They include second-in-command Doc (Randall Batinkoff), barkeep Bella (Scarlet Stallone, Sly’s daughter), Levi (Cooper Barnes), Lin (Tzi Ma), Kelly (William McNamara), Hoodoo (Mohamed Karim), Mary (Bre Blair), Hope (Brooklen Wilkes) and Thalia (Laurie Love), distinguishable mostly by the outfits provided by designers Joey Talatou and Misty Rose or their hairdos (cf. Wilkes).

Trouble soon shows up in the person of Valerie Keller (Heather Graham), who arrives with her adorable daughter Grace (Ava Monroe Tadross).  Valerie is wounded and looking for Thomas, and it’s eventually revealed that she’s fleeing her husband Robert, who soon shows up with an eye patch and a posse, actually a small army of gunfighters, intent on capturing his brother, as well as collecting bounties on his protectors. Grace’s paternity, of course, proves to be another reason for his anger.

What follows is a stand-off; think of “Assault on Precinct 13” with sagebrush and spurs.  Some of the Redemption residents, like Thalia, prove turncoats and others, like Hope, simply leave, but most hold on until the last gasp.  A few are strung up for a hanging so protracted—given the effort by friends to hold up the scaffold—that it becomes hilarious.  Over the course of nearly an hour, bullets fly as fast as the terrible dialogue and bodies pile up at an alarming rate. Naturally a final confrontation between the brothers is inevitable.

Performances are weak and stilted down the line, though a few stand out—Cage’s goofy turn, of course, for being amusingly bad, and Jackson’s overwrought, hysterical one for being just conventionally awful.  Dorff makes a drab antihero, and Graham is typically amateurish.  The production design (Elliott Montello) is chintzy and the cinematography (Patrice Lucien Cochet) nondescript, while Skiba makes his clunky direction worse with his lethargic editing, which features lots of pointless, random inserts to slow things down even further.  Richard Patrick adds a bombastic score in a failed effort to energize things.

What this movie actually slings are clichés—or maybe worse.

Producers: Thomas Zambeck, Brian Katz, Robert Paschall, Sasha Yelaun and Emanuele Moretti   Director: Scott Windhauser   Screenplay: Scott Windhauser   Cast: Tom Welling, Cam Gigandet, Cher Cosenza, Chris Mullinax, Alessia Alciati, Davide Cincis, Al Linea, Sidhartha Mallya, Sterling Griffin and Luca Malacrino    Distributor: Saban Films

Grade: D-

There are some nice shots of Rome in “Mafia Wars,” but they pretty much exhaust the movie’s virtues, though they tick up the grade just a smidgen.  (The cinematography is credited jointly to Jonathan Hall and Francesco Ciccone.)  Otherwise this is an action movie so ineptly plotted and clumsily executed that watching it is likely to leave you in a haze of confusion and annoyance.  In fact, one wonders whether writer-director Scott Windhauser was given a sudden opportunity to make a film in Italy and scrambled to toss together a script within a few days to meet a deadline.  That would account for its haphazardness.

Whatever the case, the hero of the muddled plot is American Terry Jacobs (a miscast, befuddled Tom Welling, far from “Smallville”), who’s introduced in an Italian prison for reasons unexplained.  But we’re assured he’s a good guy, because he wants to get home to his three-year old niece.  While in the clink, though, he’s become the protector of Jack (Sterling Griffin, all too convincing as a loudmouth jerk), and when he suddenly and inexplicably gets released, Jack recommends him for a job to his brother Griff (Cam Gigandet, chewing the scenery instead of pasta, and sporting a Richard Widmark lunatic smile), the right-hand man to mob boss Rossi (Al Linea).  Both are obviously American, and why they should be in charge of Mafia drug operations in Italy is never explained. 

Terry’s release has been arranged by a singularly inept, though amiably gruff, policeman named Lombardi (Chris Mullinax), who’s put together a crew to infiltrate Rossi’s outfit and forces Jacobs to be the sixth man (thus the picture’s original title, “Deep Six”).  Terry has to prove himself to Griff, who is, to put it mildly, mercurial, threatening virtually everybody by waving a gun in their faces and smirking maniacally.  He’s also plotting, with sniveling young moneyman Mangal (Sidhartha Mallya), to take over Rossi’s outfit.

Lombardi is such a dunce that he leaves his computer (which looks to be at least a decade old) and his office phone (a cord model, no less) accessible to his crooked colleague Abruzzo (Davide Cincis, harrumphing into his beard).  Since the computer prominently identifies Lombardi’s undercover agents, complete with photos, it’s no problem for Abruzzo to call Griff with their identities, though for some reason he doesn’t out all of them at once.  Terry is put into jeopardy, though fortunately another player enters the picture—a hooker called Spinx (talent-free sexpot Cher Cosenza), who turns out to be a CIA agent.  How they work together to foil the bad guys is beyond ludicrous, and it winds up in a real topper—a street fight in the Vatican, where they’re dressed up as a priest and a nun, but armed with automatic weapons.

Even among sub-B-level action thrillers, “Mafia Wars” is pretty anemic stuff.  One feels especially sorry for Welling, who was a rather appealing presence in his younger days but here (as in the recent, equally awful “Clear Cut”) seems lost, or maybe just bored.  One can’t muster similar sympathy for Gigandet, who doesn’t appear to have developed much since 2008’s “Never Back Down,” where he was the same sneering villain, only younger.  The rest of the cast is amateurish, with Griffin taking the cake in that respect.  Alfonso Rastelli is the credited production designer, and he obviously knows his Italian locations, but the movie also had a separate Dallas crew, which indicates some interiors were shot there; editor Northrup Loyd can’t do much to cover over the raggedness of the plot, nor can composer Edwin Wendler juice up the excitement level of the preposterous, flatly directed narrative.

This is recommended only for those who miss the days when premium cable networks scheduled direct-to-video quality cheapies in the early morning hours.  For them “Mafia Wars” may have some perverse nostalgia value.