How do we explain, then, the strenuous exercise in cinematic multitasking that is "The Mexican"? Director Gore Verbinski, best known for his Budweiser frog commercials, must have taken the marquee value of his stars as license to stretch his previously lily pad-bound ambitions. "The Mexican" is primarily a romantic comedy, but it also attempts to be a crime thriller and a zany meditation on coincidence and destiny.
Pitt plays the hapless Jerry Welbach, a vaguely surfer-esque Everyman (he has the clothes, but the vocal mannerisms come and go) who is paying off a debt to mobster Arnold Margolese (played by an unbilled famous actor).
Jerry's girlfriend, Samantha (Roberts), is a group therapy devotee whose primary form of expression is the spastic rant. To her, Jerry's mob affiliations represent his "inability to love," and she decides to leave him when he goes on one last job to Mexico to retrieve an antique pistol known as "The Mexican."
"The Mexican" is the depository of a legendary century-old curse, which becomes manifest as things go loco for Jerry south of the border and hitman Leroy (James Gandolfini of "The Sopranos") takes Samantha hostage for the return for the pistol. While Jerry narrowly escapes death multiple times with the aid of a flea-bitten mutt, Samantha bonds with her own newfound pet, the homosexual teddy bear/cold-blooded killer Leroy.
It's a busy mix, and even at a full two-hour running time, the antics don't add up to anything substantial. Don't get me wrong-I have nothing against insubstantial movies; Guy Ritchie's "Snatch," whose frenetic cheekiness "The Mexican" intermittently approximates, managed to entertain without having a single original or resonant bone in its bullet-ridden body.
The problem is that "The Mexican" aims to be so much more than it is. It wants to paint a rollercoaster, love-is-madness bond between Jerry and Samantha, but the machinations of the plot require that they share precious little screen time together and are allowed just one chaste kiss at the very end. When they are together, their incessant bickering hardly convinces us that they are in love. We see Samantha breathlessly chewing out Jerry over the phone when she should realistically be expressing at least some degree of concern for his safety. We see Jerry crash his car just to make a point while arguing with Samantha. The script indeed captures the characters' craziness, but not even Pitt and Roberts can make such scenes feel unforced.
Similarly, the crime-thriller convolutions yield at least one satisfying twist, but the numerous plot holes get explained away by the mysticism that accompanies the cursed pistol. I realize this is a consequence of working across genres, but the result feels more like a cop-out than a cross-fertilization. The penultimate scene, where Margolese tells Jerry his motives for finding the pistol, manages to explain it all without ever explaining why we should care.
Following this scene is one of the most ludicrous Mexican stand-offs ever filmed. The villain leans casually on the trunk of his car, inside of which he has stashed Samantha; facing down a band of rescuers, he threatens, "Put down your guns, or she stays in the trunk!" The villain's demise involves the miraculous appearance of a wedding ring. If your reaction to reading this is "Huh?", that's exactly my point.
Amidst all the romantic hysterics, double-crossing intrigue and magical realism, Gandolfini's Leroy is as solid and stationary as a rock. He offers Samantha wise counsel on the trials of love and cautiously bares his own pain. ("In my profession," he says, "it's hard to keep a relationship going.")
Hands down the most redeeming aspect of the movie, Gandolfini takes what could have been a ridiculous gimmick (gay hitman, how clever!) and makes us believe in it. His Leroy is wounded, sentimental and, yes, manly. Gandolfini gains power through stillness, and his Leroy possesses a lived-in weight that the rest of "The Mexican" desperately lacks. Ease, as Gandolfini so deftly demonstrates, is everything.