To think that the TV hacks are raking in the big bucks while true talent is reduced to writing on subway walls. "The Mexican" is actually an ornate pistola from south of the border. Everybody has a story to tell about it and everybody agrees it's cursed. The last movie by the director, Gore Verbinski, was "Mouse Hunt." This one might be called "Gun Hunt." Brad Pitt plays an all-around fuckup named Jerry, who gets himself into a jam by the most original means possible. Running a red light, he slams into a car driven by a mob boss. The cops show up and find an about-to-be victim in the mobster's trunk. The baddie gets put away, and Pitt winds up paying for his mistake by doing favors for him, every one of which he fouls up. Mr. Big gives Jerry one last chance: get his hands on this famous pistol or die.

What happens to Jerry in old Meh-hee-co seems like a vacation compared to life with his girlfriend, Sam (Julia Roberts). A shrew who has gobbled down more self-help manuals than you could shake Oprah at, Sam is convinced that Jerry's decision to try and save his life rather than move with her to Vegas as he promised is evidence of his selfishness. Sam tells him adios before he even hits the border and hotfoots it for Vegas. It doesn't take long for this New Age Red Riding Hood to meet the Big Bad Wolf in the person of Leroy (James Gandolfini), a hit man whom Jerry's debtees send to stick with Sam so they can be sure Jerry will turn over the gun when he gets his hands on it.

You can probably guess that a picture called "The Mexican" about a clueless American getting himself into trouble will feature lots of comic squalor. What you probably can't guess is that the entire movie looks as if it were processed in the toilet of a Tijuana jail cell. Shot by Dariusz Wolski in colors that are bleached out, over bright and flat, "The Mexican" is the ugliest-looking major studio release in recent memory. It's one thing for a movie to take place in a procession of anonymous hotel rooms, sleazy cantinas, dust-pile towns and functional offices where the mob's worker ants keep the empire running. It's quite another for it to look as if the people who designed those places put the movie together. The movie's end credits include mentions of drivers and security guards for Julia Roberts and the people who did her hair and makeup. Before working for Verbinski and Wolski (it sounds like a Polish bakery) again, she should hire someone to make sure that the lighting doesn't make her and the other actors look as if they're sitting in a diner at 3 a.m.

"The Mexican" plays like the last burp of Tarantinoism, the lingering remnant of a long-digested meal. Neither the pace nor the camera angles are particularly frantic. (They aren't in Tarantino either.) The comparison comes from the way Verbinski and screenwriter J.H. Wyman want to mix the comic and the horrible: like a hit man disposing of his bloody gloves to the giddy-up ending of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'."

The tone is supposed to be jittery, to keep you off-balance, and to remind you of its oddities with plums of calculatedly quirky dialogue. Some of it works. The scenes between Roberts' Sam and Gandolfini's Leroy flirt with some very un-PC attitudes, even going so far as to bait the audience. When Leroy abducts Sam he tells her he has no interest in raping her. When she finds out why, she tells him she's relieved because she thought he found her so repulsive he couldn't imagine having sex with her. It's a line designed to get people into a huff, and Gandolfini gives it just enough time to sink in before he says, "Rape's a crime of hatred, not attraction." The joke, of course, is that it's a hit man that's parroting the correct attitudes.

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