Starring Paul Gross and Sienna Guillory. Rated PG.

Western spoofs are tough to pull off. Even the mother lode of the subgenre, Blazing Saddles, is the very definition of hit-and-miss. Despite its low budget and small scope, the simplicity of Gunless pays off, and the light-handed film manages to tackle a number of fairly large themes without putting too much on the screen.

The effect is the opposite of that achieved by writer-director William Phillips’s first feature, Treed Murray, which stretched 10 minutes of obvious philosophy into a long hour-and-a-half. His hacker-action Foolproof was commercial moviemaking that suffered from overreach of a more material sort.

For the most part, though, Gunless gets it right by taking a relaxed attitude to the conventions of the western, with individuality forever in tension with the good of the group. Here, the man in black is the Montana Kid (a winking Paul Gross, with long, stringy hair), who has narrowly escaped his latest run-in with an obsessed bounty hunter (Callum Keith Rennie). Before their inevitable reunion, he will find himself stranded in Canada (actually, Osoyoos), among people whose reverence for the six-shooter is very thin indeed.

After needlessly beefing with a mountain-man blacksmith (the memorable Tyler Mane), our snarky antihero is taken in by a spunky Brit (the effective Sienna Guillory), who makes him work for his keep. A number of reliable Canucks, including Jay Brazeau, Alex Zahara, and Graham Greene, and some lesser-known actors of Asian descent show up in small parts that suggest this was not, from the start, quite as Anglo a place as those red coats would imply.

Personally, I would have avoided some of the modern-speak—“What’s with you people?” Gross’s character keeps asking—but without trying too hard, the movie manages to say sharp and funny things about where we are today.