2001 / 123 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

If you’ve seen the trailer for this film, then you have been misled.

The trailer seems to suggest that this film is some kind of quirky romantic comedy starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts. Yes, they are in the film. But they are together for perhaps ten minutes of the film’s running time. And, for those ten minutes, they mostly bicker at one another. And it isn’t the sort of fun bickering that great “African Queen” sort of films are made of. It’s the sort of boring quibbling that you turn up the TV to drown out when the downstairs neighbors are doing it. Bickering can be funny. Domestic disputes usually aren’t.

So what is “The Mexican”? Who the fuck knows! One minute it’s a mean-spirited hit man picture. One minute it’s a dumb guy in Mexico story. One minute it’s the James Gandolfini show (in its best moments) and one moment it seems to be the story of a mythical Mexican pistol.

All of these parts are, at times, intriguing. All of these parts sometimes work. But there are far too many spots that just feel forced. An awful lot of this film feels like it’s simply there to add length. Too many scenes seem simply to exist to push this film to the two hour mark so that no one will bitch about not getting their money’s worth. Thus, what might have been a pretty tightly plotted flick centering around a pistol and the poor schmuck sent to retrieve it is stretched into a film that’s sporadically entertaining, sporadically frustrating and altogether unsure of what its mission in life might be. The film pulls at itself from all ends, some aspects yanking others out of shape. This is a movie that is, quite literally, all over the map. One minute we’re in LA, then we’re in Vegas, then we’re in Mexico. Each of the movie’s main stars seems to be in a completely different movie.

Brad is in the Brad Pitt movie. This movie regards a guy with girlfriend problems, a guy who is a fuckup and is given one last chance by his mob boss employer to validate his existence by retrieving an important pistol (named “The Mexican”, hence the title). He runs into one labored, convoluted setback after another. Some of them are meant to be funny, and one or two of them actually are funny. But mostly they are just wasting time. Brad is good, though. He does what he can with a script that seems very wobbly. This stuff could have been a brilliant, tourist-nightmare movie; a Mexican “After Hours”, if you will. Instead, it just moves along, often in circles, and never very convincingly.

Julia is just wasted. What is she doing here? All she does is bitch at Brad. Some of her natural charisma shines through, thank God. Her natural charisma is the only thing that keeps us from wanting Brad to shoot her and dump her body in the desert. She’s a great actress with a thin amount of character to work with.

Gandolfini, on the other hand, nails it. He is great as a sensitive, gay hit man who is more like a therapist than a kidnapper. When he isn’t onscreen, the movie suffers. But even though he is great, he begs one question: what is he doing here? He’s another character that isn’t essential to these proceedings. I’m happy he’s aboard. He actually has a character and a fascinating one. But he pulls the movie more into a dramatic category.

So what the hell is it? Gandolfini is providing great dramatic work. Roberts is trying to do her thing. Pitt is wonderfully loopy and scatterbrained. But if it’s a comedy, where are the laughs? If it’s a drama, why is it so quirky? If it’s quirky, why do the quirks feel so much like the machinations of the screenwriter rather than anything organic. I like bits and pieces of “The Mexican”, but the script doesn’t bring them together. Toward the end, the film does seem to gel, but by that point, we’ve already been scratching our asses for two hours. It’s too little, too late.

There is some charming stuff in “The Mexican”. Too bad about the rest of it.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2001 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.