Love is a battlefield

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)
20th Century Fox presents a Doug Liman film, starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Written by Simon Kinberg. 120m. PG-13 for sequences of violence, intense action, sexual content and strong language.

3 stars

What we have here, moviegoers, is failure to communicate.

After a torrid romance in a South American villa, John (Brad Pitt) and Jane (Angelina Jolie) Smith haven’t just hit a speed bump in their marriage; they’re Titanic-approaching-iceberg-bad.

And despite their roles as highly valued assassins, the Smiths have little to talk to each other over their roasted chicken and peas. That’s because they take their cover seriously, and also because they don’t know what is already known to us: they share an almost identical occupation.

His fake life is as an engineer, in a small, nondescript office that just happens to be protected with a oversized Masterlock. She’s in “information technology,” a catch-all term so generalized he’s never tempted to ask too many questions.

The marriage is in dire straits, until one day they both get contracted for the same hit. Nothing like a rocket launcher to spice things up in the bedroom.

It takes a bit for our heroes to figure out their spouses are competition, but John and Jane catch up to their omniscient audience shortly after their mutually failed contract hit.

Then the fireworks begin, first with a shoot-out in their Ethan Allen-inspired suburban home and then with a sexually-charged romp through the wreckage. It’s a sultry, high-concept summer movie that isn’t quite intelligent enough to be a genuine thriller, despite its pretty camerawork and eye-catching A-list stars.

The chief complaint critics have lobbied against the film is that it can’t quite decide if it wants to be a laugh-fest or a blow-’em-up, as if the two genres weren’t ever conjoined. It’s clunky, sure, but did I mention how much fun it is as well?
The enjoyment comes primarily from equipping the two most attractive Hollywood stars – who also manage quite well as actors - with snarky repartee. Both think they’re impenetrable hot-shots; their discovery of each other is treated as a job, albeit with entanglements.

As John scurries from room to room avoiding bullets and tear gas, it must dawn on him that Jane is certainly the more talented of the pair. But admitting that is a form of emasculation; Jane is more than willing to keep the illusion alive to protect her dear husband’s ego. Besides, her shotgun blasts aren’t really that close to his precious little head.

Both are equipped with not only enough ammunition to make the Winchester company blush, but with best friend archetypes.
John’s guy pal is Eddie (Vince Vaughn), a lackey in the hitman firm. When the Smiths don’t wipe each other out, despite specific orders from their respective firms, the job gets fed down the line.

The price tag? An attractive $400,000 payout for each.

“Oh that’s nice,” Eddie coos. “But it takes at least half a mill to get me out of bed.”

Even if best friends won’t turn on the couple, there’s plenty of people to perform some high visibility erasing. The duo is corned in the movie equivalent of a furniture warehouse, so that they can blow up things and shoot out windows and “ooh” and “ahh” over the Scotch Guard all at the same time. The slo-mo shoot-out is all very John Woo, although I’ll admit I thought our fearless twosome were going to go out all “Butch Cassidy”-style when they were backed into a pre-fabricated shed.

Alas, this film has an extremely pat and trite ending, just as we expect from such summer fluff. And we forgive it, because it ends with a clever last line and we walk out with smiles on our faces. Besides, we’re still fanning ourselves after getting all hot and bothered by the sight of big guns and big lips and svelte bodies.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” reveals my hypocrisy when assigning ratings to films, sure. But did I mention how much fun it was?