“The Dead Don’t Hurt” is a simple revenge Western slowly teased out into rambling, meandering 129 minute saga by writer, director and star Viggo Mortensen.

He and Kevin Costner must shop at the same saddlery.

It can be cute, playful and romantic, then turn dishearteningly violent as it serves up a generous sampling of what life on the untamed frontier could be like. It’s also frustrating in its lapses in logic, its cumbersome, shuffled and dream-infused structure.

And it doesn’t so much give us a villain as serve up a sadistic, monstrous cartoon, conveniently clothed in black, as if we’d have any trouble figuring out he’s the heavy.

“Dead Don’t Hurt” opens with a death, a beloved wife Vivienne (Vicky Krieps of “Corsage,” M. Night’s “Surprise” and the recent French pair of “Three Musketeers” films) passes, leaving stoic Olsen (Mortensen) to bury her and take care of their little boy.

Their story is told in multiple timelines. We see Vivienne’s childhood (played as a girl by Eliana Michaud), growing up the tough and survival-savvy daughter of a French Canadian trapper, with her mother reading the story of Joan of Arc to her at night. We’re taken back to 1850s San Francisco, where the cute flower seller catches the eye of rich men and the dashing Danish immigrant with the pretty horse, Olsen.

“Just Olsen?”

“Just Olsen.”

And in the fictive present we witness a mass murder by our psychotic villain in tiny Elk Flats, where the banker/mayor (Danny Huston, just seen in Costner’s “Horizon”) and the killer’s rich rancher father (Garret Dillahunt of “Red Right Hand”) railroad a simpleton into a noose, taking the fall as his horse is yanked from under him in Western justice administered by a fire-and-brimstone but easily buffalo’d judge (Ray McKinnon of “Ford v Ferrari”).

The courtship scenes are adorable as we see Vivienne brusquely brush off an art dealing member of San Fran’s nouveau riche to take up with the twinkling, rough-hewn Olsen. There’s no marriage, just a “handy” romance and an “understanding.”

When he takes her to dusty, brown Elk Flats (a nearly barren canyon outside of Durango, Mexico), she mutters and sputters.

“THIS is the place you chose out of all the places you’ve seen?”

But they set up housekeeping, her with gardens and trees she has him plant, him doing carpentry for every business in town, and the rich rancher.

Things don’t really go wrong until the ex-Danish soldier Olsen resolves to take part in the American Civil War because “it’s the right thing to do.”

Her “You’re too old” and we just got together arguments falls on deaf ears, as does her “not your fight, not your country” point.

A beautiful woman who takes up bartending in rough frontier town to support herself while her man is away is all we need to know to see what’s coming.

Meanwhile, in the present, we learn that Holger Olsen was named town sheriff at some point. And with his wife buried and the wrong man already hanged, he sits his French-speaking tyke (Atlas Green) in the saddle in front of him and sets out to track the real killer down.

It’s the arid Old West. Tracks and trails don’t get washed away in the rain because it doesn’t rain. Apparently.

There are head-scratching plot elements aplenty here — a “farm” with raised gardens and nothing else done with the land, because it’s sand and rocks, the sheriff’s lack of involvement in the mass murder case (he’s in mourning) and railroading, the abrupt decision for a plainly 50something soldier to join a war with a new common law wife at home on the lawless frontier.

But Mortensen’s steady, stoic presence holds it all together. He is utterly credible in this world, perhaps the finest horsemen to saddle-up since stuntmen/actors Ben Johnson and Harry Carrey Jr. hung up their spurs.

Krieps adds a playful, sexy edge to a character she makes hard-nosed, independent and practical.

Huston just oozes fat cat corruption, and Dillahunt underplays his man of means and influence who must have once been at least somewhat as violent as his out-of-control, bullying, beating, trigger-happy son (McLeod).

The villain is as broadly-drawn as the pursuit of him is illogical.

Mortensen’s script takes a novelist Charles Portis (“True Grit”)approach to dialogue, with lots of characters showing off their vocabularies as a florid way of asserting their superiority over their fellows and the primitive world they inhabit. Drinks are “libations.” Hookers are “sporting ladies,” a bluff way of talking is “coming off full chisel” and the poor stuttering man isn’t just railroaded, he is the victim of “calumny,” an accusation the killer’s father will not countenance.

But “The Dead Don’t Hurt” turns out to be a film that’s easier to appreciate and like than it is to defend. It’s slow. The flashbacks are uneven, with Vivienne’s childhood and the fictive present choppily mixed in with them.

Nobody looks better on a Palomino than our man Viggo. But what kind of veteran-of-two-wars sheriff loads his kid into the saddle IN FRONT OF HIM as he rides off to gunfight an experienced shot and mad dog killer?

Rating: R, violence

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Vicky Krieps, Solly McLeod, Garret Dillahunt, Ray McKinnon and Danny Huston

Credits: Scripted and directed by Viggo Mortensen. A HanWay Films/Shout! Studios release on Amazon.

Running time: 2:09