Communication problems the world over. An American tourist is struck by rifle fire in Morocco, arousing erroneous worries of terrorism. An illegal-alien nanny drags along the two towheads in her care to a Mexican wedding, and runs afoul of the Border Patrol on their return. And a horny pantyless deaf-mute Japanese girl can't get a man, any man, to take an interest in her. These three storylines are fashionably "interlocked" (anyone who can recognize the voice of Brad Pitt over the telephone will immediately know the connection between two of them), and the film strategically ends in the same place, from a different point of view, as it begins, coming full circle. The illusion of complexity, for all that, could scarcely be more transparent. Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, much in the manner of his Amores Perros, achieves depth only in the way that a hero sandwich achieves it; and it achieves length -- almost two and a half hours of it -- in the same way as a footlong at any Subway shop. Tenuous in construction, slack and sluggish in pace, sketchy and far-fetched in plot, the film does nothing to justify its epic length or its cosmic ambitions. (The Mexican storyline, particularly weak, goes nowhere until it goes bananas: a series of decisions so bad as to forfeit all sympathy for the characters, let alone for the storyteller who compelled the characters to make the decisions.) With a somewhat calmer camera than his norm, however, the director does some nice scene-setting, some impressionistic documentation of the locales, to help realize his goal in sheer duration. With Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barraza, Gael García Bernal, Koji Yakusho, and Rinko Kikuchi. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd