Grade: A-

Verdict: A terrific ensemble comedy-adventure about guns, messy relationships and dusty El Caminos.

Details: Starring Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini. Rated R for violence and profanity. Two hours, 3 minutes.

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Review: In "The Mexican," Julia Roberts goes south--but don't worry, her career doesn't. She doesn't have to worry about her latest movie tarnishing her chances as Oscar voters decide whether to give her the trophy for "Erin Brockovich."

No, her new, blood-spattered comedy-drama doesn't give her a monumental role like last year's film. But it demonstrates her shrewd ability to choose strong material that balances out her fluffier choices ("Runaway Bride," "Stepmom").

In "The Mexican," Roberts isn't the star player. She's part of a team, a great team. She plays Samantha, the shriller half of a dysfunctional-but-in-love Los Angeles couple who rely a little too much on interpersonal psycho-jargon. "Now you blame-shift?" she says in one of many tiffs with her boyfriend. "You are blame-shifting?"

The boyfriend in question is Jerry (Brad Pitt), an affable, slightly hapless guy who runs errands for a group of mobsters, but not by choice. (The movie eventually explains his predicament, simultaneously illuminating the opening image of a busy L.A. intersection.) His latest assignment makes him break a planned trip to Vegas with Sam--which in turn leads her to break up with him. He doesn't have much choice: His boss (the creepy, deadpan Bob Balaban) has ordered him to fly south of the border to retrieve a priceless handmade, and reportedly cursed pistol known as the Mexican.

Pitt and Roberts make a prickly, very funny couple. But the movie's most dynamic pairing is Roberts and James Gandolfini. In not much of a stretch from his "Sopranos" role, Gandolfini plays a hit man named Leroy who kidnaps Sam as insurance that Jerry will return from Mexico with the gun. As he puts it, "I am just here to regulate funkiness."

So, yeah, in case the trailers misled you, Roberts and Pitt spend most of the movie apart. You won't really mind. Pitt's plot sends him through a dusty, dirty landscape of small-town Mexico, where Jerry gets and loses and gets and loses the Mexican, encountering car thieves, crooked cops and an endearing old mutt who's devoted to a deflated football.

Meanwhile, in a series of motels and diners en route to Las Vegas, Sam and Leroy gradually become an endearingly oddball couple. She showers him with therapy-speak ("I'm sensing you have trust issues"), while his no-nonsense approach to matters of the heart makes her reconsider her break-up with Jerry. J.H. Wyman's sly screenplay also throws in a couple of developments that deepen Leroy's character in ways that are best experienced as a surprise. (Gandolfini, equal parts sensitivity and steeliness, is wonderful.)

Though "The Mexican" hinges on plot twists and turns, it takes time to let us get to know the characters. It isn't afraid to risk making them look bad, either. Sam goes ballistic without provocation around Jerry, and Jerry can be clumsy to the point you fear he'll never get out of Mexico alive. Sam understandably says to him, "You have managed to Forrest Gump your way through this." Constantly quarreling, but made for each other, they are like the stars of a Gen-X remake of "Two for the Road."

"The Mexican" mixes elements of film noir, screwball comedy, road-trip adventure and arch, Quentin Tarantino-style violence. (Producer Lawrence Bender is a vet of "Pulp Fiction.") It has some of the assured, on-the-road lunacy of "Flirting With Disaster." The movie also features a tongue-in-cheek mystical side, showing us three fables concerning the bloody origins of the sought-after pistol. To his credit, director Gore Verbinski ("Mouse Hunt," believe it or not) does a surprisingly good job of juggling the film's many tones, leading us through peril to a guilt-free romantic ending.

But the movie may get heat from Mexicans, depicting the country, as it does, as a place where the locals take no more note of a corpse in the street than the sight of a dusty El Camino.

— Steve Murray, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution