THE MEXICAN
Directed by Gore Verbinski
Written by J.H. Wyman.20
With Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt
Grand Illusion 123 min R
Major motion picture studios may be dumb, but they're not stupid. When you get a movie starring a couple of golden kids like Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt opening on March 2nd, chances are there were a few bomb-sniffing dogs on the prowl somewhere up in the Perrier-stocked suites of the front office.
Do Julia and Brad have chemistry? It's hard to tell. For most of this two-hours-but-feels-longer movie, they're in different countries. She's heading for Las Vegas, where she hopes to get a job as a waitress with an option to move up to casino dealer. He's in Mexico trying to get possession of a gold-plated antique gun (the eponymous "Mexican") for his mob bosses. Instead, she gets kidnapped by hitman James (The Sopranos) Gandolfini (does anybody ever consider casting Gandolfini as an ambassador or an art dealer?), who's been sent by mob types to make sure Brad delivers the gun. Brad, meanwhile, is having problems of his own south of the border with corpses and dogs and larcenous types. We see them together at the very beginning, when she throws his clothes out of the window (and couldn't we have lived without ever seeing that cliche again), and at the end, with a few telephone tirades strung into the middle.
There is some rewarding chemistry, but it comes from the Roberts-Gandolfini tandem, which may explain why Julia and Brad get so little face time. She experiences a bit of Stockholm Syndrome, becoming emotionally involved with her captor. Not romantically - A) because he resembles Yogi Berra, and B) because he's gay. Instead, he gets to be the Gay Friend, and in some of the movie's best scenes, they perform couple counseling on each other. In a moment of questionable taste, she admits she was initially offended when she asked if he was going to rape her and he said "Not very likely," but feels much better when she finds out his sexual orientation.
It's a comedy-adventure. You know it's comedy because of the clothes-defenestration scene - that happens seldom in real life and never in drama - and from Brad saying lines like : "When you told me to pick up the thing at the thing, well, Samantha, she wanted the car to pick up some things." Periodically it forgets that it's comedy-adventure, and then people get killed in messy and unamusing ways.
"The Mexican", the gun for possession of which the denizens of this movie (and we) go through so much, turns out to be cursed. Unless it's in the right hands, it backfires.
There's a cheap quip there, but I wouldn't touch it for a free weekend in Cab San Lucas.
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