‘The Mexican’ borderline fare

Geoff Carter

Friday, March 2, 2001 | 10:30 a.m.

Grade: ** 1/2

Starring: Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and James Gandolfini.

Screenplay: Richard Recco and Demian Lichtenstein.

Director: Gore Verbinski.

Rated: R for strong language and violence.

Running time: 123 minutes.

"The Mexican" is one of those movies that make me wonder what happened. The story is needlessly convoluted, the performances telegraphed and unconvincing. It feels like a screwball comedy that was put on the rack and stretched.

Brad Pitt stars as Jerry, a small-time mob courier sent to retrieve an antique pistol in Mexico called, imaginatively enough, The Mexican. It's his last job to satisfy a debt to a crime lord he unwittingly sent to prison (the crime lord is played by a prestige actor and shows up late in the film, well past the point when such an introduction really matters).

Jerry's girlfriend Samantha -- Julia Roberts as Marisa Tomei -- throws the first of many hissy fits, dumps Jerry and high-tails it for Las Vegas.

That's about all. You never doubt that Pitt will retrieve the pistol after a series of misadventures; you don't doubt that Roberts will take him back. And you never can bring yourself to care what happens to either of these largely unsympathetic characters.

I could have easily slept through "The Mexican" and not even so much as dreamt of a mariachi band without the timely intervention of James Gandolfini's gay hit man, Leroy. Leroy is sent to nab Samantha and insure that Jerry doesn't mess up. As he succinctly puts it, "I'm here to regulate funkiness."

When Gandolfini comes into the narrative, you can feel him lock the film down. He doesn't seem like much when we first see him: With his hangdog expression, neatly trimmed Vandyke beard and workingman's white shirt and black slacks, he seems more Xerox copier repairman than Tony Soprano. But within seconds he guns down a rival, grabs Roberts and makes a hair-raising getaway, his features set with grim purpose.

I can't say enough about the amazing range Gandolfini displays in "The Mexican." Almost 15 minutes to the second after he kidnaps Roberts, the two of them are making conspiratorial talk in the ladies' room while Gandolfini combs his beard, pulls disdainfully at the bags under his eyes in the mirror and shimmies to music only he hears. But of course Samantha falls in with the guy; he is patient, unfailingly polite and possessed of more grace than anyone else in the film.

Roberts' only believable scenes are with Gandolfini, which makes it fortunate that most of the film has them together -- and unfortunate that the plot demands frequent cutaways to Pitt bumbling his way through the Mexican desert. Pitt is a good actor with comic gifts that are frequently misused, as they are here: Pitt manages to pull off Jerry's bug-eyed reactions and confused hysteria, but he can never quite make the character likeable.

When the time comes for Roberts -- and the film -- to choose between Pitt and Gandolfini, "The Mexican" makes an ill-advised choice from which it never recovers. The ending hardly registers, but even with the film's poor handling of Gandolfini it wouldn't have mattered anyway: Leave it to A-list Hollywood to end a film called "The Mexican" with an honest-to-goodness Mexican standoff.

Let it all go -- the crime lord element, the silly flashbacks that tell the legend of the pistol, the strained love story and just concentrate on Gandolfini. Watch for the tired, disgusted way he sinks into a chair when no one's looking, the legitimate compassion in his eyes when Roberts breaks into her girl-jilted histrionics, the way a smile ambushes his deadpan face.

In a stronger film, Gandolfini's performance would have garnered Oscar notice. Here, it's checked at the border as the better-looking marquee stars roar into no-mans land, screaming their lines and driving in confused, ever-shrinking circles.