A ‘romantic action comedy’ which never quite gels, The Mexican is presumably sorted for box-office takings, but it’s sure to disappoint fans of Pitt and/or Roberts (who and whereabouts are these people, anyway? Write to us with your problems.) It’s the kind of romantic lead coupling that has ‘$’ signs flashing across the eyes of Hollywood boardroom execs – but in their (thankfully rare) moments of shared screen time during The Mexican, they generate all the heat and passion of a second-hand office furniture sale.

Lovable oaf Jerry Welbach (Pitt) owes favours to the wrong people, and ends up in the employ of smalltime low-rent gangsters in order to repay the debt. Hence, he is sent to Mexico to retrieve an antique pistol which is valuable but cursed. In doing so, however, he incurs the wrath of his longtime girlfriend Samantha (Roberts), which is every bit as fearsome as what one might expect from double-crossed gangsters (except liberally peppered with accusing extracts from ‘therapeutic’ classics such as Men Who Can’t Love). When Jerry finds his Mexican mission less straightforward than expected, the mob decide to up the ante and send gay hit-man Leroy (Gandolfini) to take out insurance by kidnapping Samantha. In no time, Samantha and Leroy are bonding through exchanges of bargain-basement psycho-babble which only serves to make one yearn for the days when movie mobsters didn’t have ‘issues’. In fact the primary problem here is that, between Analyze this and The Sopranos, one suspects we’ve had all the laughs we are ever going to get from seeing gangsters in therapy. Certainly, it’s no longer the inherently comedic device that this movie rather lazily believes.

The Mexican, like so many movies before it, patently and desperately wants to be a Tarantino flick. The problem is that only one man can do Tarantino, and it definitely isn’t Gore Verbinski (in fact, in ten years, only Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight comes anywhere close). Ironically, given that The Mexican’s two big box-office hitters both took large pay cuts in order to do this mid-budget indie effort, they prove to be by far the film’s biggest burden – Roberts, presumably punch-drunk on Oscar glory, overacts horrendously and squanders any cred she may have gained for Erin Brockovich, while Pitt, all facial tics, is at his worst since Twelve Monkeys. Only Gandolfini emerges from this with his thesp-rep intact, and even he seems in acting auto-pilot mode.

Possibly the single most disappointing thing about The Mexican is that it represents director Verbinski’s follow-up to MouseHunt, a masterful family flick directed in the style of Kafka (had he been a director: you get our drift). Here, the best he can drag from the script and cast is wildly over-mannered acting and over-anxious ‘comedy’. The star factor will, of course, attract audiences in their droves – but one suspects they won’t stick around for this watchable but monumentally mediocre material for too long.