“Smith Happens in This Paranoid Bullet-Fest”

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are big-screen eye-candy—a built-in box-office draw for ogling members of both genders—but it’s too bad the script they had to work with here wasn’t as sweet. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is one paranoid affair: for five or six years, John (Pitt) and Jane (Jolie) Smith have maintained the semblance of a perfect marriage while leading double lives as assassins for two different covert agencies. Jane always has dinner ready when John gets home at seven pm, and they dispassionately discuss their days’ like two news anchors covering a human interest story—their table talk is peppered with so many generalities and pleasantries, you’d swear the pair just met for the first time. The escalation of knives sequence is amusing as is Jane’s oven armory, but these scenes soon grow tiresome because the audience is in on the joke, but the Smith’s aren’t.

At the thirty-minute mark, the first hint of a plot surfaces when John and Jane are assigned the same mission by their respective agencies. The operation is bungled and the match is a draw, but the evidence left behind leads the Smith’s to a startling discovery (one that we’ve known about since we saw the trailer)…their spouse is an enemy agent. There’s a scene—which becomes tedious after the first volley of bullets—where the Smith’s make Swiss cheese out of their house while trying to kill each other with an arsenal of guns, knives and any other weapon they can get their hands on. When attrition finally sets in and a stalemate becomes evident, the Smith’s realize all the blood, sweat and passion is a turn on and they begin making out amid the rubble; but the reunion of lovers is short-lived as another group of assassins arrive and put more holes in the walls.

Having sat through the first half of the movie in chronic boredom and utter disappointment, I found the last half to be a vast improvement: the Smith’s team up against a common enemy and finally open up and share the truth about their sordid pasts. I found their banter to be especially amusing during the car chase scene—Jane admits to having hired stand-in family members at their wedding—and the final, destructive showdown in the warehouse is an elegant death dance with Matrix-style action shots.

Vince Vaughn plays his standard wide-eyed weirdo as John’s best-friend-turned-enemy and Kerry Washington briefly pops up as one of Jane’s aides. I have no qualms about the acting, but the trouble with Mr. & Mrs. Smith, besides its skewed reality of extreme deception and destruction, is that it becomes a parody of itself. Perhaps this story would have worked better as a sci-fi film, as our disbelief would already be suspended to lofty heights. In the real world, this kind of paranoid farce only flies if you’re watching Alias at a fondue party—and you don’t have to pay ten dollars for that!

Rating: 2 1/2

Tags: Action, Comedy, Romance