‘Gringo' is a weak attempt at Tarantino

Harold Soyinka, a midlevel executive at a Chicago pharmaceutical company, is originally from Nigeria. This puts someone in mind of those princely email swindles.

It's a pretty weak joke (made worse by the fact that Harold says an uncle of his made a fortune that way) and also an example of what passes for irony in “Gringo,” a new movie directed by Nash Edgerton from a screenplay by Anthony Tambakis and Matthew Stone.

Harold, you see, is a perfect sucker, an innocent whose trusting good nature makes him an easy target for grifters, scammers and liars.

There are a lot of those in his life, including his wife, Bonnie (Thandie Newton), and his boss, Richard (Joel Edgerton, the director's brother), a type-A blowhard who insists that Harold is his friend.

Richard and Elaine (Charlize Theron), his predatory colleague-with-benefits, are planning a merger and are also involved in some off-the-books deals in Mexico having to do with medical and nonmedical marijuana.

A business trip down there goes south in fairly predictable ways, at least in the context of the kind of hectic, strenuous, nasty caper-comedy “Gringo” aspires to be.

Harold, as he wises up to the fact that he's been played, takes matters into his own hands, faking a kidnapping and setting off a flurry of chasing, shouting, coitus interruptus and gunplay. A few familiar characters are summoned from the cliché repository and outfitted with a random quirk or two. The ruthless drug kingpin (Carlos Corona) is obsessed with the Beatles. The international mercenary (Sharlto Copley) is running a nonprofit in Haiti.

The small-time hood (Harry Treadaway) dragging his clueless girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) into potential danger has a British accent. Harold, as we've established, is from Nigeria.

He is also played by David Oyelowo, which turns out to be a mixed blessing. Oyelowo is without a doubt the best thing in “Gringo,” supplying the only grace notes in a cacophony of secondhand attitude and facetious overacting. But the deck is stacked against him, much as it is against Harold, who as the designated nice guy is assumed to be the least interesting person in the movie.

The attention is lavished on his foils and tormentors, who are cut from gaudy, worn-out cardboard and set in motion like furious windup toys.

Theron vamps and sneers, Joel Edgerton struts and blusters, and everyone works hard to sustain a mood of jokey, wised-up menace. It is possible to sit through it all without feeling completely miserable, and to remember a time when these comic-grotesque shenanigans might have seemed fresh. The mid-90s, roughly, when this kind of knockoff of early Tarantino, middle-period Coen brothers and jaunty Elmore Leonardism enjoyed something of a vogue. If you're tempted by “Gringo,” you might be better off streaming something from that era.

By the time the violence escalates from the amputation of a toe - happy birthday, “The Big Lebowski” - to gunshots to the head, “Gringo” has long since blown out its own meager brains.

You keep rooting for Harold, of course, because he's a decent fellow who has done nothing whatsoever to deserve any of this.