“The Thicket” is a Western built on archetyepal characters pursuing one another through a forbidding and unforgiving archetypal Western landscape.

It’s a wintry fin de siècle “manhunt” for a young woman, and another woman gang-leader named Cut Throat Bill who kidnapped her. “Thicket” is a new, modest-budget indie film version of “The Searchers,” “Big Jake,” “The Missing,” and any other saga about men (and women) on horseback hunting others who have taken hostages.

The violence, the beautifully forbidding Alberta winterscapes and the presence of Peter Dinklage, Juliette Lewis, Leslie Grace and Arliss Howard recommend this generic horse opera. But archetypes clanging up against the cornball indulgences — missteps taken in dozens of similar films — kind of undo it.

We’re treated to a bloody inciting incident at a ferry across an icy river, a fight in a brothel to rescue a woman (Grace) sex-trafficked into working there, a stand-off at a fur trading post/saloon and a shootout at a snowbound cabin in the woods. But we roll our eyes over coincidences, worn out tropes of the genre and the way characters — even unschooled ones — quote the Bible, Shakespeare and Latin to each other for effect.

It’s the early 20th century, and a remote farm has lost its parents to “the smallpox.” Young Lula (Esme Creed-Mills) and older brother Jack (Levon Hawke) bury them, and wait for grandpa (Guy Sprung) to show up, burn the place down to disinfect it and take them to another relative.

They never make it. A motorbiking madwoman in leather helmet, goggles and furs has rounded up her gang. Scarred, “ugly” and quick to anger, Cut Throat Bill (Lewis) threatens one and all at that ferry with “You afraid of me?”

Taking a shot at her doesn’t help. Grandpa’s entirely too old to save his “We don’t want no trouble” for AFTER taking that shot and adding a scar to Bill’s collection.

The wipeout that follows leaves Jack staggering back to consciousness only to realize Lula’s been taken.

At a nearly lawless nearby town, “Jones” (Dinklage) and Eustace (Gbenga Akinnagbe) are scraping together a living by burying shooting victims. Not paying them is just the start of the trouble for the alderman (Ryan Robbins) who taunts and threatens the diminutive Jones.

“Ain’t exactly a fair fight there, stubs!”

Jones and Eustace are soon on the run themselves when Jack talks them into tracking down Bill for the bounty on her head so that he can free his sister. “Searchers” style warnings that Lula is already “probably not the sister you remember” suggest her fate — raped, kept as Bill’s lover for a bit, etc. — don’t deter Jack.

So the hunt is on.

But alderman Bailey (Robbins) deputizing sibling goons (James Hetfield of Metallica plays one) to hunt down Jones and Eustace for what they did to him when he thought he’d get away with a few “midget” jokes and cheating them out of their money. The hunters are themselves hunted.

Chris Kelley’s script, based on a novel by Joe R. Lansdale, serves up a few “End of the West” touches — the motorbike we see the masked Bill ride in on, the motorized wagon Jones and Eustace cross the Northern West in, without a Sheetz or other filling station in sight.

But the idea here, as in “Big Jake” and in the “Yellowstone” prequel series “1923,” is to remind us how lawless and violent the region could still be, even after it was settled, tamed and Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell “modernized” it.

This picture seems a bit out of its time. The weather-worn churches and villages too tiny for the railroad to bother with are terrific details. But the “smallpox” could have been later-arriving Spanish Flu, and certain other touches might have made all this tie together better and seem more firmly of its day.

Characters behave rashly, often in ways that defy their self-interest. Jones turns out to be a man with a colorful past and “particular skills.”

Lewis leans into the scars and the life that gave them to her character, making her a worthy foe.

“Yewww thank I’m purty, don’t ye?”

The charismatic Dinklage ably plays a new version of the cynical, cool and confident rider of the range.

At one point, these two antagonists meet and drink and compare notes on how society treats the “ugly” and the “short.” That scene has solid acting and a little emotional heft. But like more than a few other turns, it makes little sense logically and narratively.

Like Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” director Elliott Lester, cast and crew have some stunning snowbound settings, a smattering of hard-boiled Western prose, some tough guy/tougher broad stand-offs and a lot of shooting.

Nice try and all that. But there’s just too much that hobbles this horse opera to let it gracefully unfold and canter off into the snowy sunset.

Rating: R, graphic violence, rape, profanity

Cast: Peter Dinklage, Juliette Lewis, Levon Hawke, Esme Creed-Mills,
Gbenga Akinnagbe, Leslie Grace, James Hetfield and Arliss Howard.

Credits: Directed by Elliott Lester, scripted by Chris Kelley, based on a book by Joe. R. Lansdale. A Tubi release.

Running time: 1:45