"The Mexican"

But those moments are little distractions in the long slog toward the finish line. "The Mexican" is one of those movies you go to see at 7 p.m., look at your watch three hours later and see that it says 7:45. You can count on the comic-violent interludes to punctuate the story at regular intervals. The film isn't grim but it's got no spirit, none of the wildness and release you'd expect from what's essentially a road comedy. Verbinski stages a scene of a boa'ed Roberts dancing in her hotel room with Gandolfini looking like he was playing an oldies station while cleaning out the garage. The movie wants to surprise us with its unexpected, spit-in-your-eye approach but it's all rather cheerless.

There's a good joke in the character of Sam. She's a type that we've all run into: one ready to parse any moment in a relationship for its subtext, but who really uses the pop-psych terms she's picked up as a way of bullying her partner into giving her what she wants. The character is meant to express the comedy of the completely selfish woman who feels aggrieved, searching for herself.

Fifteen years ago, the role would have been perfect for Catherine O'Hara. Today, Cameron Diaz could probably run with it or, if the filmmakers had wanted to venture a little further out into the ether, Brittany Murphy. But among Julia Roberts' many virtues there is not, alas, either a manic spark or a whirligig spirit of comic ditziness. When Roberts can take charge, as she did in "Erin Brockovich," she's fine. But she has a potentially fatal flaw for someone who keeps getting cast in romantic comedies: There is absolutely nothing yielding about her. So there's nothing endearing about Sam: She simply comes off as a nag fully aware of what she's doing.

Brad Pitt acts as if he should be given brownie points for looking like he does and acting like a goof. He recalls no one so much as Ryan O'Neal in the comedies he made with Peter Bogdanovich, and like O'Neal he makes the choice that's fatal to comedy: acting like he knows that what he's doing is funny. It's best that Pitt and Roberts don't really start to have scenes together until the movie's last half-hour: The chemistry between them is zip.

The second-best performance in the movie is from a mangy mutt Jerry acquires with a beat-up pickup truck and never quite manages to get rid off. Every time he appears, the dog is carrying around a deflated football as if he were just waiting for someone to show up and show him a good time. It didn't take long for me to start identifying with him.

The best performance, and something of a miracle given what he has to work with, is from James Gandolfini, from "The Sopranos, who's so calm and assured that everyone else's scurrying around blows away like so much chaff. His Leroy is a guy whose simplicity cuts right through the self-created dramas of everyone around him. When Sam starts spilling her love troubles, Leroy's responses cut right to the chase. He tells he he doesn't believe in shrinks but he's got the equilibrium of a dream shrink. The alleged gag of the performance is that Leroy is gay, a joke that rests on a stupid stereotype, namely that no one who looks like James Gandolfini could ever be gay. Gandolfini triumphs simply by not treating Leroy's gayness as a joke.

The preview audience I saw it with laughed nervously a few times where neither Gandolfini nor Verbinski are going for a laugh. Leroy and Sam pick up a guy they meet in a cafe and Gandolfini tells Roberts he's fallen for the guy. He tells her he confessed to him that he's a hit man and received the lover's blessing of "the past doesn't matter" in return. The sequence goes right to your heart, probably because it seems to come directly from his. A later scene where Pitt's Jerry is allowed to get the upper hand on Leroy feels as if the gods that govern the movies have lost their power. Watching Brad Pitt exult in triumph over James Gandolfini is like waking up in some alternate universe where Gorgeous George has just knocked out Muhammad Ali. But Gandolfini is the real champ here. When Pitt and Roberts storm out of the car in an argument and Gandolfini sits there patiently, no more than rolling his eyes in frustration, you want to tell him to start the engine and leave these two in the dust. He's the only traveling companion in "The Mexican" who makes the trip seem worth it.

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