February 4, 2001 -- "The Mexican" is an odd romantic comedy filled with unusual characters and an odd combination of genres from road movie to western. It works well as much because of its quirky story as because of its talent-laden cast.

Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts are mega stars, but James Gandolfini (of "The Sopranos" TV show), playing an emotionally vulnerable hit man called Leroy, steals the show. Roberts plays Samantha Barzel, girlfriend of small time crook Jerry Welbach (Pitt). Pitt is ordered by a lieutenant of crime boss Arnold Margolese, to go to Mexico to pick up a legendary gun called The Mexican. He is also to pick up Margolese's grandson and return him and the gun to Margolese. Barzel is furious with Welbach for accepting this assignment, even though he has no choice in the matter. She says she will break up with him. Barzel and Welbach speak in a sort of self-help psychobabble code. She calls him a "blame shifter," among other things.

Arriving in Mexico, Welbach finds out that The Mexican is a cursed gun. He is told the legend of the gun, which he sees in his mind's eye as an old slightly-flickering movie in bleached-out sepia tones. It involves a love triangle with a nobleman, a poor man and a beautiful girl, and the gun. As soon as Welbach gets The Mexican, things start going wrong. The curse has struck. Meanwhile, Barzel is kidnapped by Leroy, and is threatened by yet another hit man (played by Sherman Augustus), in an apparent attempt to put more pressure on Welbach to secure the gun.

Soon, Barzel begins to psychoanalyze Leroy, the hit man. The two share their emotional secrets and become fast friends, or at least they seem to. Leroy's true intentions are somewhat of a mystery. She says, "You're a pretty sensitive guy for a cold-blooded killer." Meanwhile, Welbach is having no end of trouble with the curse of The Mexican. Is Welbach's and Barzel's sputtering relationship worth all this hassle? The central question of the film is when do you call it quits when two people love each other, but just can't get their relationship to work? Pitt and Roberts and Gandolfini all do fine comic work in the film. Gene Hackman plays a small, uncredited, but crucial role in the film. Bob Balaban (Nayman) and J.K. Simmons (Ted) are funny as a couple of upwardly mobile mob guys just trying to make enough money from crime to retire.

Parts of the film are very funny, while other parts of the film are quite tragic. There are funny sight gags and jokes, mixed in with at least four bloody deaths, two of them murders. There's also lots of double-dealing and back stabbing going on. This is like mixing oil and water, but it works, on a shallow level. Black comedies, mixing murder and laughs, have been done for a long time, notable examples being Feiffer's "Little Murders" and Kubrick's classic, "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." The difference between this movie and those is that there was a strong satirical underpinning for those earlier films. Even "Pulp Fiction" and "2 Days in the Valley" had more substance than this film. I'm a little troubled by the combination of comedy and murder in films like "Payback," the Lethal Weapon films, "Speed" most Schwarzenegger films and some Bond films. It begins to make murder seem casual, a thing done for laughs. It was probably just a coincidence those shootings took place in Santana High School the day after the opening weekend of "The Mexican," but the guy doing the shooting was smiling as he shot the people. I guess he was having fun. Nobody else was.

Director Gore Verbinski ("Mouse Hunt"), cinematographer Dariusz Wolski and editor Craig Wood do a fine job putting the various pieces of the story together (written by J.H. Wyman). The sepia-toned scenes of the legend of The Mexican (there are three versions of the legend in the movie) works very well to create a the mythic aura around the story of the priceless gun. The location shots in Real de Catorce, a small city in northern Mexico, add a rich and varied backdrop for parts of the film. Alan Silvestri's fine musical score reverberates with echoes of Ennio Morricone's classic spaghetti western scores. This film rates a B.

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