The films of Quentin Tarantino are a blast and a goof -- they're caustic and mischievous, filled with in jokes, self-referentiality, a mordant wit and tour de force imaginations in scene setting. But as time goes on, his movies grow thin. His most memorable contentions -- gangsters are stupid, crime is absurd, even that Pam Grier has enormous dignity -- in the end are mere reminders of things we know already.

The Mexican film "Amores Perros," described on a page, sounds like a Tarantino movie. Three or four stories are intertwined by quirks of fate and coincidence but not temporal reality. A gang of thugs sets mastiffs on one another in underground dog fights. A young man tries to run off with his brother's provocative but noncommittal wife. A cop hires a hit man to kill his brother-in-law. A beautiful model, maimed in a car crash, is forced to look out a window at a giant wall poster of herself in her pre-accident glory.

But "Amores Perros," which was nominated for best foreign film at this year's Academy Awards (it lost to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), is really a meditation on some very un-Tarantino-like concepts. Alejandro González Iñárritu, directing Guillermo Arriaga's script, has other things in mind: His mélange of brotherhood, marriage, murder and dogs is designed to put into relief the experience of a certain perverse segment of humanity as it roils and churns under the pressure of civilization. He sees the breakdown of love and the allure of violence as dehumanizing, rather than the stuff of irony or cheap humor. It separates men and women from their true selves, reduces them to the level of animals.

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Such moralizing -- though ultimately "Amores Perros" has no moral -- would seem trite were it not for the filmic ferocity with which González Iñárritu spits out his tale. The film has been routinely compared to "Traffic," but that is because the Mexico City milieu here is on the surface similar to the Tijuana the Benicio Del Toro character inhabits in that film. But those "Traffic" scenes were filmed in a washed-out, sere yellow: The world of "Amores Perros" is a supersaturated candy show of lights and hues, designed to contrast all the more starkly with the dark fruits of consequence: blood bubbling blackly out of bullet holes, bruises swelling and sex filling the screen with brown flesh.

The kinetic shocks of the story belie González Iñárritu's intents here. What turns out to be the second part of a glancing trilogy seems tonally at odds with the first. Halfway through you start feeling disappointed that the director has lost his way. But then you discover that his narrative arcs -- and his theme -- are much more grand, much more challenging, and the questions he's asking are bleak ones. Are we men, or animals? Angels, or torturers? Do we marry, or merely mate? Is a dog redeemable? Are humans? And the darkest scene Quentin Tarantino has yet filmed can't compare to González Iñárritu's frank admission that he can't answer any of those questions.

-- Bill Wyman