movie review the mexican

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The Mexican Reviews

There is a lot of fun to be had with this film, despite it’s relatively uneven nature.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 27, 2024

As a dark comedy it has a somewhat appealing visual style, but its journey across the Mexican wasteland becomes downright dull and it falls to the ground like a stray bullet. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | May 10, 2023

Gene Hackman holds the responsibility of conveying the entire history of a character, the entire core of who this man is, in a single scene. He manages it without breaking a sweat.

Full Review | Original Score: 6.5/10 | Sep 22, 2022

The Mexican of the title is actually a gun, not a person, which seems as instructive as any other detail of what might be wrong with not only this film but with the whole Hollywood project.

Full Review | Feb 25, 2020

The Mexican is sporadically entertaining. It works when Gandolfini is on screen; when he leaves, he takes the movie with him.

Full Review | Oct 25, 2018

Brad and Julia, of course, look great. Buy the poster; skip the movie.

Full Review | Mar 6, 2018

From the word go, the film is almost begging to be hailed as 'quirky' and 'offbeat'. It's ironic, but only in a gentle way that hovers between laidback and imperceptible.

Full Review | Jan 30, 2018

An interesting mess for older teens and up.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 28, 2010

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 8, 2009

It just sits there, doing nothing that a competent made-for-cable movie with C-list stars couldn't do.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Mar 11, 2008

First pairing of Hollywood's beloved stars Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts is a mixed blessing in this mishmash of a movie, in which different genres and styles strenuously compete for our attention.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 17, 2007

The Mexican coasts along throwing at us double-agent/double-crossings intrigue, witty one-liners, and some evocative scenery.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 27, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Habla usted mediocre movie?

Full Review | Original Score: C | Oct 6, 2005

The Mexican fails because the entire movie changes its tone from one moment to the next.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Dec 6, 2004

I left hoping that I never see either of them again in anything.

Full Review | Original Score: 0/4 | Jun 23, 2004

Gandolfini is especially good as the hitman with a heart of gold.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 1, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 14, 2003

The final concern for the audience is not how the film will end (you won't care), but when?

Full Review | Feb 13, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 8, 2003

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Movie Review: 'The Mexican'

Gore Verbinski, who directed The Mexican , is a TV commercial auteur whose award-winning reel includes the first Budweiser talking frogs spot. (Verbinski stretched as an artist in his feature directorial debut, reaching out to rodents in Mouse Hunt .)

Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, on the other hand, who star in The Mexican , are top of the food chain — they’re BRAD & JULIA, prince and princess of Hollywood, brought together for the first time in a historic union of box office royalty.

And here’s where worlds collide: Every now and then, when this picaresque caper loses its way, you can imagine Pitt and Roberts, each posed prettily on a lily pad, ribbitting BRAD. JULIA. BRAD. JULIA. You can envision them basking especially when the mournful flourishes of the soundtrack’s Mexican trumpets fall in a decrescendo of tinny cliches. And when the atmospheric scenes of dark-eyed kids waving sparklers blur from overuse. And when all the ancillary characters up to no particular good for no particular reason become wearisome. And when you can’t tell whether Verbinski is going for romance, comedy, or a Nike ad.

BRAD. JULIA. BRAD. JULIA. He smiles. She smiles. He squabbles charmingly with her. She scrabbles delightfully with him. In a flick of the tongue, they’ve pulled in more ticket buyers.

Do they entertain? Yes, as movie stars can, costumed in eye-catching amber and umber and ruby-colored T-shirts, staging a ”scene” in which a pair of lovers ”fight” or ”flee bad guys.” Do they create characters worth caring about — i.e., does Pitt convince us that he really is a conflicted Mob bagman named Jerry, and that he really is in danger when he’s sent south of the border from Las Vegas to retrieve a valuable antique pistol called ”the Mexican,” and that Roberts, as his girlfriend, Samantha, really is so committed to better communication with her man that she drags him to group therapy, and that the intrinsically adorable duo are crazy in bickering love? Ribbit .

This would-be-Peckinpah, wannabe-Tarantino, could-be-Gilliam story, with its contemporary, ironic dodges and feints, is, after all, made for a pair of stars with a quarter of the worldwide luster of BRAD & JULIA. Literally. The nuts-and-bolts original script by J.H. Wyman was first envisioned for relative unknowns, who would have been free to play the fun, frenetic heck out of hellishly-in-over-their-heads Jerry and Sam. Even somewhat-knowns (Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton?) or better-knowns (Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock?) might have had a clearer shot than best-knowns at freeing Jerry and Sam from the ennui of the script’s larkiness and disposable irony: Bob Balaban plays a control-freak Mob heavy, Oz ‘s J.K. Simmons a neurotic Mob sidekick — are there no more happy-go-lucky wiseguys left on screen? (There’s also a requisite deadpan Mexican car rental agent, pawnbroker, grandmother, and smart dog.)

Alternatively, BRAD & JULIA might have made a perfectly okay, B-size product — but for the striking A-level performance of James Gandolfini as Leroy, a complex, anti-ironic hitman who kidnaps Samantha to further ensure the gun’s safe return. (The pistol, by the way, has a tragic curse attached to it, not counting the curse of calling forth scenes of old-timey Mexican drama that seem to have been swept off the cutting-room floor of All the Pretty Horses .)

It’s not the fault of The Sopranos ‘ charismatic, beefy star that he’s an actor of such substance and quiet ardor as to make idle movie star ribbitting look frivolous. But from the moment he enters the story, in a wordless scene involving Samantha, a highway rest-stop toilet stall, and a gun, Leroy ups the ante — and ups our hopes for a story with true grit. (Samantha clearly responds to his gravitas.) Leroy is, hands down, the person we care about most, and when he’s not on screen, the tortilla flatness of The Mexican becomes even more frustrating.

”I’m here to regulate funkiness,” he explains to his hostage, but really, what Gandolfini demonstrates is how one powerful player can regulate the thermostat of an entire film. Not only is the actor who currently rules pop culture as Tony Soprano able to step believably into a new character’s skin, but he’s also able to calm the leading lady’s itchy skin: In her scenes opposite Gandolfini, Roberts hops far from her lily pad, to a place that’s the closest to emotional truth we’re going to see from her Samantha, and the communication between hostage and hostage taker takes The Mexican , at least for a time, to an exciting place. (Albert Finney knew how to draw exciting work from Roberts in Erin Brockovich too; I see an award-winning future for her playing opposite tough guys.)

Then it’s back to frogland again, and cute scenes with Pitt and a doggy. Croak . C+

The Mexican STARRING Brad Pitt Julia Roberts DREAMWORKS RATED R 120 MINUTES

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The Mexican

Boasting far more star power than substance, "The Mexican" is an intensely whimsical shaggy-dog crime story that ricochets between goofy violence and some endearing personal moments. Hard-to-categorize pic reps a dream B.O. teaming of Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, even though the two stars are deglamorized in this context .

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

Remember Me 15 years ago
Shutter Island 15 years ago
Green Zone 15 years ago

Boasting far more star power than substance, “The Mexican” is an intensely whimsical shaggy-dog crime story that ricochets between goofy violence and some endearing personal moments. Hard-to-categorize pic, which will have buffs thinking Peckinpah or Tarantino lite, reps a dream B.O. teaming of Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, even though the two stars are deglamorized in this context and only appear together at the beginning and toward the end. Slight but enjoyable DreamWorks release looks to generate hefty late-winter returns.

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Mixing moods like crazy and delighting in tough-guy talk as well as jargon-loaded therapyspeak, script by J.H. Wyman (“Pale Saints”) sends its beautiful protags off in two opposite directions when the lovebirds take a “time out” from their squabbling. Doofus Jerry (Pitt), a crimeland errand boy in deep to the mob after having caused an auto accident that landed kingpin Margolese in prison, is forced by milquetoasty lieutenant Nayman (Bob Balaban) to do a “last job” — to recover a legendary 19th-century pistol called “The Mexican” in a small south-of-the-border town.

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Why remotely self-respecting gangsters would send an oaf like Jerry on any mission remains a question throughout. Jerry seems to have lucky and unlucky streaks that balance each other out: On the one hand, upon arriving in San Miguel, he manages to get his hands on the gun in remarkably short order; on the other, the man he gets it from is killed by a stray bullet falling from the sky, and Jerry is left high and dry when his car and the gun are stolen almost immediately thereafter.

That all this is not meant to be taken with the utmost seriousness is indicated by Pitt’s deliberately broad comic playing, by the caricaturing of “sinister” Mexico as seen from a gringo p.o.v. and by Alan Silvestri’s jaunty score, which with its whistling refrains conjures up memories of Ennio Morricone’s great Western soundtracks.

Just as Jerry is contemplating a longer stay in Mexico than he bargained for, Samantha (Roberts), who’s furious at Jerry for “selfishly” taking a job he was coerced into, heads for Las Vegas with vague professional plans. Almost at once, she’s accosted in a ladies’ room by a gun-toting man (Sherman Augustus) who is himself shot down by beefy hitman Leroy (James Gandolfini), who kidnaps Sam as a hedge against Jerry completing his mission.

After exhausting her futile protests that she and Jerry have split up, Sam, who’s like a heat-seeking missile where personal issues are concerned, gets tough guy Leroy to start opening up. “You’re a very sensitive person for a cold-blooded killer,” Sam compliments him, and it isn’t long before Sam, in perhaps the film’s best scene, noses out the information that this ruthless assassin is actually gay, that he is emotionally vulnerable and has never been able to keep a relationship together.

This aspect, compounded by the casting of “The Sopranos” tough-guy Gandolfini, might have threatened to come off as a mere stunt, but the actors make it not only credible but touching and winning, the most genuine thing in the picture. Roberts is especially good in communicating the thrill that Sam takes in her own intuition about Leroy, while Gandolfini, embodying but going way beyond the thug stuff, creates a character rather like a gay version of Paddy Chayevsky’s Marty, a loser in love who is genuinely surprised that someone else might take an interest in him.

Pic’s ping-ponging structure renders every transition like a chapter heading — “Meanwhile, back in Mexico…” — and Jerry’s ever-changing fortunes find him quickly moving from getting about by donkey to daringly retaking his car from its thief to being arrested by a corrupt cop. Latter is one of three men who, in the course of the film, relates a distinct version of the fabled gun’s cursed history, which is shown in sepia, silent-movie style.

As if realizing that a fool’s errand can’t be expected to hold interest forever, Wyman and director Gore Verbinski finally tighten the screws a bit after 90 minutes, as all the surviving participants come together in Mexico to bring the gun search, and the central romance, to some resolution. Even here, the notes struck are alternately rough, facetious and a little bit sad. Although they’ve lucky to have survived to have this reunion, Jerry and Sam can’t resist immediately laying into one another, while it takes none other than an unbilled Gene Hackman as criminal kingpin Margolese to explain why this wild goose chase had to happen at all.

Verbinski’s direction is loose, fluid and attractive, and the entire cast seems to be having a grand time. Looking fine but college-age scruffy, Pitt is constantly doing pirouettes trying to contend with all the twists of fate that sneak up behind his character, while Roberts submerges the glamour-puss stuff as much as humanly possible for her to give a lively reading of a mentally limited but lively working-class woman. Aside from Gandolfini’s outstanding supporting turn, J.K. Simmons creates a fresh characterization as a mob functionary who takes a time-card-punching approach to his job.

Silvestri’s deliberately derivative score, which is accompanied by some well-chosen tunes, reps a major plus. Tech package as a whole is tops, and main location of Real de Catorce, a small city in northern Mexico, supplies great character and unusual visual opportunities.

Production: A DreamWorks Pictures release presented in association with Newmarket. Produced by Lawrence Bender, John Baldecchi. Executive producers, William Tyrer, Chris J. Ball, Aaron Ryder, J.H. Wyman. Co-producers, William S. Beasley, Paul Hellerman. Directed by Gore Verbinski. Screenplay, J.H. Wyman.
Crew: Camera (Technicolor, Panavision widescreen), Dariusz Wolski; editor, Craig Wood; music, Alan Silvestri; production designer, Cecilia Montiel; art directors, Michael Atwell, Diego Sandoval (Mexico); set designer (Mexico), Juan Pablo Garcia; set decorators, Robert Greenfield, Sandra Cabriada (Mexico); costume designer, Colleen Atwood; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Lee Orloff; supervising sound editor, Tim Holland; sound designer, Tom Myers; assistant director, Frederic Roth; second unit director (Las Vegas), M. James Arnett; casting, Denise Chamian. Reviewed at Todd-AO West, Santa Monica, Feb. 26, 2001. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 123 MIN.
With: Jerry Welbach - Brad Pitt Samantha - Julia Roberts Leroy - James Gandolfini Bernie Nayman - Bob Balaban Ted - J.K. Simmons Beck - David Krumholtz Car Thief - Richard Coca Frank - Michael Cerveris Well Dressed Black Man - Sherman Augustus Joe the Pawnshop Owner - Castulo Guerra Arnold Margolese - Gene Hackman

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