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Fifteen Minutes
Directed by John Herzfeld 
Starring Robert De Niro, Edward Burns, Vera Farmiga, Kelsey Grammer, Melina Kanakaredes, Tygh Runyan, Janean Christine Mariani

What do you think of Brad and Julia as a couple (Pitt and Roberts, on the off chance you need last names)? Looking at their new movie The Mexican, it's hard to tell. Not because their scenes together aren't appealing or interesting (they are), but because there are so few of them. In fact, Roberts's character has more face time with a gay hit man, and Pitt's best bonding occurs with a ferocious dog. 

If The Mexican isn't a romantic comedy (and commercials to the contrary, it's not), then what is it? There are elements of screwball comedy--Pitt's character must get sidetracked at least ten or eleven times during the course of the film, and his verbal battles with Roberts are quite funny. But it's also a crime drama, as various characters try to recover a beautifully hand-crafted pistol. And it also feels like a genre exercise at times, with director Gore Verbinski (Mousehunt) evoking or subverting old desert westerns from the '50s and '60s. In short, The Mexican is a mess.

That is certainly true of the movie's plot, which I won't even try to summarize. Suffice it to say, it involves Pitt repeatedly finding and losing the aforementioned pistol. Meanwhile, several hundred miles away, Roberts has been kidnapped by a goatee-sporting hit man (The Sopranos' James Gandolfini) as a way of forcing Pitt to give up the gun. Other unsavory folk include Nayman (Bob Balaban, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) as Pitt's erstwhile boss and a Mexican car thief (Richard Coca, Lone Star). All of these characters finally hook up south of the Rio Grande, though even that meeting isn't as tidy as it could've been.

But maybe clean and neat are overrated. The Mexican certainly has some funny moments, the acting is generally strong, and the absence of any directorial authority isn't unusual for a Hollywood star vehicle. I guess I was just hoping Julia and Brad would be together for more than fifteen minutes. 

The Mexican is rated R for strong language and occasional violence. 

Fifteen Minutes, the new film starring Robert De Niro and Edward Burns, is a mess of a different sort. The first ninety minutes, in which De Niro and Burns (playing a big-shot police investigator and a small-time arson investigator respectively) try to track down two immigrants suspected of a brutal murder/arson, are engaging and surprisingly focused.

Much of the credit has to go to De Niro, who endues his celebrity cop character with a strong shot of gravity and reserve. Rather than overacting, as is sometimes De Niro's want, he is unusually low-key here. His character goes about his business with purpose and without resorting to grandiose gestures (an ever-present cigar being the only sign of machismo). This creates a serious and solid foundation for the other characters around him.

Ed Burns (Saving Private Ryan) looks like a kid next to De Niro, but that's part of the point, and their camaraderie is quite believable. Other characters on the good guy side of the ledger include De Niro's partner (played by Avery Brooks, "Deep Space Nine") and De Niro's reporter/girlfriend Nicky (played by Melina Kanakaredes, "Providence"). The two scenes between De Niro and Kanakaredes, in which De Niro attempts to propose marriage, are genuine highlights. Their chemistry is palpable and genuinely sweet. It's unfortunate more couldn't be done with that subplot.

On the bad guy side of the ledger are Emil and Oleg, the two immigrants (Karel Roden and Oleg Taktarov as the Czech and Russian). Emil is the somewhat crazed killer, while Oleg is the one who videotapes everything, and I mean everything. You see, Oleg, who's obsessed with movies, steals a video camera in the film's opening minutes and proceeds to capture Emil's ever-more-outrageous crimes. Emil becomes transfixed by daytime talk shows and reality tv, and decides that he can make a bundle of loot by selling his crimes to tabloid tv star Robert Hawkins (played with slithery charm by Kelsey Grammer, "Frasier"). And this is where Fifteen Minutes runs off the rails.

Director and writer John Herzfeld previously wrote 2 Days in the Valley, one of the early Tarantino ripoffs. Here, his point of reference is Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, and Herzfeld clearly hasn't learned from any of that film's egregious mistakes. The final act of Fifteen Minutes is a ludicrous, over-the-top exercise in excess. Guns, explosions, burning buildings, shouting matches, stylized chaos, and an unhealthy obsession with video destroy all of the good work Fifteen Minutes does in its first two acts. Like Natural Born Killers, Herzfeld's movie thinks it has something to say about our nation's obsession with crime and celebrity, but it's merely just a muddled disaster of conflicting ideas and outright hyperbole. 

Fifteen Minutes is rated R for extreme violence, language, and nudity.

J. Robert Parks 3/5/2001