Review: Mr. and Mrs. Smith

It’s as if Mr. and Mrs. Smith exists only for its own satisfaction.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Photo: 20th Century Fox

Doug Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith is not a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 comedy of the same name, but both films concern couples in failing marriages. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (the Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard of their time, perhaps?) star as a husband and wife in Scenes form a Marriage-style couple’s therapy. They’re not having sex anymore and their dirty little secrets are to blame: For five or six years one has been hiding from the other that they’ve been working for rival spy organizations—the kind whose employees get to play with what-the-fuck high-tech gizmos and identification systems that understand there can only be one woman in the world with a body like Jolie’s.

When their respective employers hire them to kill The O.C.’s Adam Brody, not-so-plain John and Jane go for each other’s throats and Mr. and Mrs. Smith reveals itself as a fetish film for anyone who takes People magazine as a serious source of investigative journalism (or people who wear Lance Armstrong bracelets as badges of cool). The magazine’s Most Beautiful Man and Woman of 2005 waste countless rounds of ammunition on each other, eroticize domestic violence, and before you can say “get a room,” they do! No house, wine glass, freeway, discount department store, or Tony-Scott-lit third-world country is safe from this squabble, which reveals itself as foreplay for the reincarnation of the couple’s marriage.

Advertisement

You won’t see another film this year that coasts as long as it does on the sex appeal and posturing of its actors, and while I can’t imagine anyone besides Pitt and Jolie in these roles, it’s a shame there’s so little meat on the film’s bones. Individual moments are fierce (Jolie flies off yet another skyscraper and, during an exciting car chase, two cars poetically reveal themselves from behind another), but it’s as if Mr. and Mrs. Smith exists only for its own satisfaction. Like the condescending gurl-power Jolie is often forced to wear like a placard (“Why do I get the girl gun?” she asks at one point), the whole thing reeks of tabloid pandering.

Score: 
 Cast: Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Adam Brody, Kerry Washington, Vince Vaughn  Director: Doug Liman  Screenwriter: Simon Kinberg  Distributor: 20th Century Fox  Running Time: 120 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2005  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.