10 Marvellous Movie MacGuffins

The Gun in The Mexican

Director Gore Verbinski is no stranger to the MacGuffin – be it the mouse in Mousehunt, the heart of Davy Jones in Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, or the water in Rango. None have been simpler for him than the gun in The Mexican, however, as an unlikely group of characters examine their relationships through the prism of parallel road trips, in pursuit of this elusive and special weapon.

Jerry (Brad Pitt) is something of a ne’er-do-well who is working off a moral obligation to a gangster (Gene Hackman), with whose car he once collided – revealing a victim in the trunk, and putting the gangster in jail. Amid constant arguments with his long-suffering girlfriend, Samantha (Julia Roberts), he is tasked with the fated ‘one last job’ – to go and retrieve a historically significant gun known as The Mexican, from Mexico. He goes, gets the gun, loses the gun, and pursues the gun. Simultaneously, Samantha is being held captive by a man identifying himself as ‘Leroy’ (James Gandolfini), and they begin to pursue Jerry and the gun, too. They also bond and become great friends.

During the course of the characters’ respective journeys, they each achieve some kind of clarity in their otherwise chaotic and unruly lives – all of which reaches an explosive conclusion when their paths finally converge. The MacGuffin in question would be decidedly Hichcockian in nature, were it not for the detailed backstory of the gun – which reflects the romantically cursed nature of the lives of those currently involved with it. The inclusion of that context immediately makes the nature of the MacGuffin vital to the story, and the story itself much more about the concept of fate and destiny.