Movie Guide Cdn. Director Gore Verbinski, best known for a Budweiser beer-frog ad and the innovative Mouse Hunt, took a loopy idea and turned it into an awkward, sprawling mess.
Audiences get bored.
The lug in the seat beside me for Wednesday's preview fell asleep and snored. Especially Verbinski, who let the actors goof off instead of inspiring or obliging them to act, to create characters, to do their jobs as stars. Pitt, shucking off the comic brilliance he showed in Snatch, mugs in The Mexican. The frumpy-ugly Roberts screams, stammers and hams up her role as his girlfriend. In a story that kicks off in L.A., Pitt plays a dim-witted doofus who has become indentured to a mobster because of a car accident.