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The Rice Thresher
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Melissa Bailey thresher staff Hold your breath, everybody - Julia Roberts is being cute again. In fact, she's positively oozing cuteness. In an early scene in The Mexican, she stands on a balcony clad in a fuzzy pink sweater, curls bouncing, lips pouting, flouncing from here to there as she flings her boyfriend's (Brad Pitt) belongings down at his head. He dodges, begs, stands bemused and befuddled, and holds out his hands, palms upward, in a helpless plea. Essentially, this scene tells you everything you need to know about this movie. For the rest of its interminable two hours, Roberts continues to flounce and pout, Pitt goes on acting bemused and befuddled, and more objects of various kinds fly at people's heads. Pitt plays Jerry, a hapless, ordinary young man who had the misfortune to become entangled with the mob years ago. Unwittingly responsible for sending a mobster to jail, he's been trying to work off the debt ever since. Unfortunately, he manages to bungle every job they give him. When the movie opens, Jerry has just failed yet again, and his sinister boss decides to grant him one last chance: He must go to Mexico and retrieve a valuable pistol known as the Mexican. If he fails, Jerry loses his life. Why these supposedly ruthless mobsters have tolerated the incompetent Jerry this long - and why they would entrust him with such an apparently important job - remains a mystery. Jerry's long-suffering girlfriend Sam (Roberts) wants stability. When she learns that Jerry's involvement with the mob hasn't ended, she throws him out and runs off to Las Vegas to become a waitress. There, she is promptly kidnapped by a mobster bent on using her as leverage to acquire the pistol from Jerry. From here the movie splits in two. We are forced alternately to watch Jerry blunder around Mexico and Sam flounce around the States while the filmmakers try, unsuccessfully, to make us laugh. The jokes are relentlessly unfunny. On Jerry's side, they're mostly of the "dumb American in a strange land" variety, always tiresome and sometimes downright offensive. Jerry doesn't speak Spanish. Jerry drives a junky car in order to appear "authentic." Jerry gets lost and must enter questionable bars and deal with silent inscrutable Mexicans. Jerry loses his car, then his passport, and tries to hitchhike with a group of men in a truck: "I need a lift in your el trucko to the next towno." This sort of pedestrian action goes on and on. Meanwhile, Sam is busy being spunky and cute. She is cute when frightened, adorable when angry, lovable when trying to escape. She makes friends with her kidnapper (played with occasional insight by James Gandolfini of "Sopranos" fame), who turns out to be misunderstood, sensitive and gay. They discuss relationships over coffee in a diner. They dance around a hotel room and play music, with Sam wearing sparkly pants and a feather boa. (God knows where she got them; she didn't pack a suitcase before being kidnapped, but she's wearing a different outfit in every scene.) "You got a very special woman here," the kidnapper ends up telling Jerry, with the rough wisdom typical of such characters in movies like this. Roberts and Pitt had a wonderful time making this movie. They're enjoying themselves immensely. It's not as much fun for the audience. The movie has a few real moments, thanks to Gandolfini, but they feel oddly placed. There are some deaths that sluggishly tug at your emotions, but they don't really belong in this movie. Comedy follows drama so closely that both come across as merely farcical and ill-placed. A series of flashbacks scattered throughout the film explain the gun's melodramatic history, and while the story is ridiculous, I found myself watching for the flashbacks eagerly. Comically surreal and sometimes genuinely humorous, they provide a welcome break. The Mexican is not a complete disaster - it's tripe, but polished, well-made tripe. If it were a half hour shorter, it might almost be bearable. But too much of the movie is material you've been beaten over the head with before. From beginning to end it feels contrived and constrained. As I came out of the theater I overheard a girl saying defensively, "I thought it was cute!" Cute. Exactly.
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