Flak Magazine: Review of The Mexican, 3-14-01

In just five short years of making movies, Dreamworks has already become the unspoken master of teaming big stars with directors of whom we've seldom heard.

Why we've been forced to watch Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock join forces with the director of Harriet the Spy is a mystery I'll never solve. Has Dreamworks put in effect a movie-industry talent cap that prevents a film with two major stars from having a quality director? Ask John Travolta and Lisa Kudrow and maybe they'll tell you.

In much the same way The Peacemaker brought us George Clooney, Nicole Kidman and the director of, well, stuff from TV, The Mexican puts together Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, "The Sopranos'" James Gandolfini and the guy who directed fucking Mouse Hunt. The end result is a movie noteworthy only for its overwhelming, skull-crushing averageness. Movies this unremarkable are usually terrible; yet The Mexican toes the line between mediocre and not bad with a deftness unseen since Charlie's Angels.

Despite having a writer as inexperienced as its director, The Mexican manages to hang its hat on always-amusing, nutty-bad-guys humor. The bungling Jerry Welbach (Pitt), through circumstances related to his bungling, has found himself in the employ of a seldom-seen, locked-away gangster named Margolis (Gene Hackman), whose ruthless right-hand man Nalin (Bob Balaban) will take no more of Jerry's shenanigans.

Having botched his last job because his control-freak girlfriend (Roberts) needed to use the car, Jerry is near the end of his rope, almost literally. He's given one assignment, which will be his last. He's to go to Mexico and retrieve the antique pistol from which the movie dervies its title.

The errand will be Jerry's last because if he fails, he's dead. If he succeeds, he's free to leave his life of crime behind for a lifetime of marital bliss with said girlfriend, Samantha.

But is it really bliss? From all indications, Samantha is a shrewish, psychobabbling nut with a knack for taking everything she and Jerry learn from their marital counselor and turning it against him. She bandies about terms like "blame-shifting," "giver" and "taker," and Jerry is clearly being a taker for agreeing to run this life-or-death errand rather than take her to Vegas, like he promised.

So Jerry heads for comic misadventure in Mexico, while Samantha tucks her copy of "Men Who Can't Love" under her arm and heads off to Vegas. Alone.

What Jerry doesn't realize, though (among many, many other things), is just how valuable the antique pistol he seeks really is. Nalin does, though, and he dispatches a hitman named Leroy (Gandolfini) to apprehend Samantha, who will serve as collateral in case Jerry tries funny stuff that seems well beyond anything that would ever occur to him.

It's a terrific set-up, especially when Gandolfini's character slowly starts to realize that Samantha isn't lying when she tells her captor she and Jerry broke up and that she's useless as collateral. Meanwhile, Jerry's adventures south of the border are the sort of situational wackiness plied so effectively by Guy Ritchie in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and its thematic sequel, Snatch.

But the movie's nowhere near as funny as it's capable of being, largely because it attempts far too many different things without any of them really panning out. Roberts and Gandolfini (whose character turns out to be a soft-guy gay toughie who gives great relationship advice) have terrific chemistry. But the hackneyed chick-flick send-up idea is played out in a few too many scenes. Besides, a guy who gives great relationship advice and turns out to be gay? How many times are we gonna see this?

Similarly, Pitt and Co.'s ham-fisted efforts to retrieve the pistol are hilarious fish-out-of-water/Small Time Crooks kinda stuff. But when you add to it plot holes the size of Chiapas, you're left with a herky-jerky, offbeat comedy that sadly doesn't live up to billing.

Puzzlingly, though, unlike most movies that don't reach their potential, The Mexican comes close enough to make the movie half-entertaining. Sepia-toned scenes of different people's takes on The Mexican's backstory are hilarious, with the same cast of characters doomed seemingly forever to act out alternate versions of the tale whose endings are wildly divergent and wonderfully off-the-wall. Pitt makes a great lovesick, distracted stooge, and Roberts is way more likable as a makeup-less everywoman than she was in movies like Notting Hill and Runaway Bride.

And that's the problem The Mexican poses. The plus and minus columns are both piled equally high, meaning the question of whether to see it can best be answered with another question: What else is playing?

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)