Unfortunate Travelers.(Review)

The history of French literature features endless arguments about melange des genres: whether two different genres can be mixed successfully. If the new movie The Mexican had been available to the anti-mixers, what hay they could have made with it! The film, an attempt to cross a romantic comedy with a shoot-'em-up thriller, concerns a supposedly priceless, antique hand-crafted Mexican pistol, which in my admittedly non-pistol-packing view looks like a piece of florid flea-market junk. As does the movie itself.

The amiable bumbler Jerry (Brad Pitt) has, through an unfortunate accident, become a gofer for a bunch of inept but murderous L.A. gangsters. Having bungled things before, he is given one last chance to save his skin by retrieving the valuable weapon and delivering it to the gang, just when he was supposed to drive to Las Vegas with his irascible girlfriend Sam (Julia Roberts), who wants to become a croupier.

Why she wants to leave L.A. is unclear, as is why, however much she hates Jerry's reluctant involvement with the gangsters, she doesn't respect his desire to avoid being rubbed out by them. Sam is a psychobabbling shrew, and Jerry one of cinema's stereotypes, the lovable loser who turns into an unlikely hero. After Sam throws out Jerry in a postcoital pandemonium, the lovers go their separate ways and do not reunite for ninety minutes of film, which is not what you want from a romantic comedy with two starry heartthrobs.

Sam heads for Vegas and, after a bizarre shootout in a roadside ladies' room, ends up captive to a hit man, Leroy, who holds her hostage lest Jerry try something funny with that priceless pistol. Leroy (James Gandolfini of The Sopranos) and Sam develop a simpleminded symbiosis after it emerges that he is gay, and that a homosexual hit man is doubly handicapped in affairs of the heart. Sam in turns spills her guts to the love-starved killer (albeit only figuratively) and gleefully helps him pick up a young male lover, whereupon the trio travels for a while in a merry but one-third mismatched menage a trois.

Jerry's adventures down Mexico way are a similar mix of giggles and gunplay. Before you can say B. Traven, our dopily grinning gringo is mixed up with some sinisterly umbrage-taking hombres, the matter complicated by his monolingual stabs at pidgin Spanish, as when he tries to thumb a ride to the nearest "town-o." As the film-o progresses, we get several monochrome flashbacks to contradictory versions of the pistol's prehistory, melding patronizing farce with comic carnage. At last, the gang sends another hit man to get the gun and Jerry's scalp.

The fierce and the farcical are given too much screen time to intertwine; Pitt and Roberts, too little. The film is also far too long, with endings upon further endings coming faster than bullets, and almost equally deadly in their desperate attempts at humor. J. H. Wyman's screenplay and Gore Verbinski's direction are not above such moribund cliches as Jerry looking sadly after Sam as she is about to board a plane away from Mexico, at which point a truck blocks his view. The plane takes off, and he sadly turns to leave when . . .

you can fill in the rest.