Z/Web

Exactly what you’d expect from the ads: a slick action film with humor. Chow Yun Fat is awesome as always, and Seann William Scott is also good. Jamie King, as the girl, is also good, though she looks way too young for her character. The plot is silly, as you might expect, with the key villain an ancient Nazi who’s been trying to obtain a scroll from Chow Yun Fat for 60 years. Chow is the monk who guards this scroll, which gives the reader power to rule the world (so of course no one has ever read it). He figures out pickpocket Scott fits the prophecy and is to take over the job of guarding the scroll for the next 60 years, and together they defeat the Nazi. Nothing intellectual at all about this, but good fun.

This good have been a good film except it’s got 90 minutes worth of material and spreads it out over two hours. Thus all the scenes drag, and what little action there is isn’t enough to wake you up. The premise seemed routine to me — everyone wants a priceless pistol called “The Mexican” — but in the end it does make a little more sense than it seems on the surface. There’s some great stuff here: Brad Pitt as a loser sent off to fetch the gun for his ganster employers, and Julia Roberts as his girlfriend who’s kidnapped by a gay hit man who’s holding her hostage to ensure her boyfriend comes back with the gun. The scenes with Julia and the gay hit man are terrific, definitely the best part of the film, but even they drag occasionally and they give the film a very different feel from the action flick the rest of the movie purports to be. Julia and Brad have broken up, and she’s just hideous to him whenever she’s with him, nagging and screaming at him, so much so that her character is repugnant to the viewer. But in the scenes with the hit man she’s sweet and nice and charming — very odd change of character. Brad’s character is likewise strange: he’s such a idiot we have trouble relating to him or feeling too sympathetic since he creates most of his own problems. Both of these problems could have been minimized by tighter editing: with a faster-paced film we wouldn’t have time to be as bothered by such issues, and of course Julia wouldn’t have time to get on our nerves as the Shrew. Overall this isn’t a bad film, but it’s not great either. It’s falls into that dreadful “average” category. The sad thing is it had great potential and could have been really good as the material that’s there is excellent, it’s just spread out so much it’s almost incoherent.