*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, James Gandolfini, Bob Balaban
screenplay by J.H. Wyman
directed by Gore Verbinski
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I don’t have an idea to start this review. This is in large part because The Mexican has no idea to start itself, or give itself a middle, or pay off nicely with a tense climax. It just rambles on, with no reason to live, justifying a few paychecks and leaving this reviewer simultaneously puzzled and bored. Puzzled, as to how such a vast array of professionals could have wanted to cobble together such a passionless and irrelevant film as this; and bored, at events meaningless and contrived. The Mexican isn’t even ambitious enough to be offensive: its conceptual hook is so weak and its follow-through so perfunctory that the film can’t rally the strength to be more than a petty nuisance, like a dinner disrupted by the noisy party the next table over.
Let us consider the plot. Jerry (Brad Pitt) is a hapless young man who is trapped running errands for the crime boss he accidentally sent up the river. Having bungled what was to be a final job–due, in large part, to the unsupportive nature of his girlfriend, Samantha (Julia Roberts)–he is assigned one more duty: go to Mexico and bring back both a priceless vintage handgun and its current possessor, the boss’s grandson. At this point, any regular viewer of movies should be able to figure out that the grandson will die, that the gun will be stolen, and that Jerry’s ultimate survival will depend on his ability to retrieve the object of desire and return it to his soon-to-be-released patron. This is a chancy proposition, as there are many interested parties ready to pounce on the gun, jeopardizing the lives of both Jerry and Samantha, who is taken hostage to ensure Jerry’s attention remains on his final objective.
The question I asked myself after experiencing this setup is: how could any firearm, vintage or otherwise, be deemed so important that people are willing to kill for it? Despite a faux-soulful explanation by the winner at the end, there’s no satisfying answer to the question. Despite various retellings of the inevitable legend surrounding the possibly cursed gun, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s a pretty feeble excuse for a MacGuffin. Watching all of these people steal, shoot, or murder for what is ultimately a collector’s item with a great backstory doesn’t inspire much respect for their willingness to move heaven and earth to find it, and so the urgency of Jerry’s mission, in addition to everyone else’s, winds up being undercut by our total disinterest in its outcome.
But disaster might have been averted had the film provided enough foreground intrigue to compensate for the background action’s shortcomings. Unfortunately, the leads are so badly drawn that they don’t resonate, either as people or as parts of a grander design. Splitting the film between Jerry’s misfortunes and Samantha’s trials at the hands of her kidnapper, Leroy (James Gandolfini), we are stuck with three hugely uninteresting characters. Jerry gets to run around looking harried and bent out of shape, improvising as the machinations of the plot keep getting him closer, then farther, from his goal; the arbitrariness of his fortunes gives him nothing to do but stand around in a state of panic. Samantha, meanwhile, spouts touchy-feely clichés at her captor, working herself into a pop-psychology frenzy on both Jerry’s failures and Leroy’s love life. She’s shrill and emotional in ways that only exist to be curtailed by the superseding masculine importance of Jerry’s problems. And Leroy is saddled with the cliché-du-jour of being the gay confidante to the straight heroine, meaning he takes Samantha’s magical love advice and winds up subverted by his secondary relationship to the central, straight relationship. All familiar, all annoying, all devoid of meaning.
One can only wonder why J.H. Wyman wrote his script in the first place. I can see why other bad films come to be: either someone was passionately wrong about the strength of the idea or they had a gimmick that marginally justified its run-of-the-mill studio qualities. But The Mexican has neither passion nor gimmick. It seems as though several other genre screenplays merged into one, losing their distinctive qualities in the process of making one skeletal über-script. Pop films, when they work, speak deeply of and to the currents that move already through the culture; for better or worse, they reveal deep yearnings and common fantasies that define the climate of the times. The only thing The Mexican reveals is a desire to make a screenplay sale, determinedly sucking anything felicitous out of the mix that will eventually lie inert on the screen.
I could keep trouncing this film. Matching wits with Wyman is the classy but non-committal direction of Gore Verbinski, who doesn’t read anything into the action beyond a lightly polished gloss that shows off the film’s budget. And then there’s the depiction of the film’s Mexican characters (a surprising percentage of whom speak perfect English), which has not advanced much beyond the stereotypes of The Wild Bunch and Three Amigos!. To belabour the points would be to give this film entirely too much credit. The failures of The Mexican are not important enough to chew over; its game plan is too vague to learn anything from its dissection, as it should leave you with a corpse already picked over by the vultures who masterminded its untimely death. Originally published: March 5, 2001.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers As this DreamWorks DVD shows, an edgier and maybe better version of The Mexican lay on the cutting-room floor. There is a supplemental section of eight scenes that were removed whole-cloth from the film (either for time or to ensure that nobody outshone Brad or Julia; as an aside, while Roberts received first-billing on the theatrical one-sheet, Pitt gets that honour on video promotions), and there’s some really good, if ultimately unpleasant, stuff here, including a charged dialogue between “the real Leroy” and homosexual Frank (Michael Cerveris), and an extension of the emotional breakdown of Gandolfini’s character. Each omission contains commentary with at least Verbinski and occasionally screenwriter J.H. Wyman and editor Craig Wood as well, all three of whom also provide a yak-track for the feature proper that DreamWorks assures within the disc’s cover art is “insightful,” a brilliant attempt at critic-proofing. Truth be told, this is a fulfilling commentary, with a lot of the discussion geared towards visual and thematic intent and Verbinski lamenting the film’s clipped shooting schedule.
Boasting strong, well-separated colours, commendable shadow detail, and little to no unintentional grain, the 2.35:1, 16×9-enhanced letterboxed transfer of The Mexican itself has a film-like appearance. It’s ideal, as are the intricate DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes. The two near-miss car accidents are guest-listener material in either sound format, with Dolby handling the LFE channel in a tighter-than-usual manner. (With participating studios using compromised bitrates for DTS these days, they’ve actually given the false impression that Dolby Digital has improved.) HBO’s practically worthless “The Making of The Mexican“, “in-depth” production notes and “detailed” cast and filmmaker biographies, the teaser and standard theatrical trailers (which, like the deleted scenes, are presented in clean anamorphic widescreen with Dolby Surround audio), and a nice case insert ride The Mexican DVD off into the sunset. A strange movie that docks on a nice platter.
123 minutes; R; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DTS 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; DreamWorks
