Mr. And Mrs. Smith

Reviewed By Rich Drees

     Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are John and Jane Smith, an apparently successful Long Island couple who has found that after five years their marriage has grown stale. This is in part due to the secrets they keep from one another - chief of which is that unbeknownst to one another, they are both the top assassin for rival, unnamed intelligence agencies. They only discover their spouse’s secret after inadvertently scuttling the other’s assassination attempt when they are both assigned to kill the same person. Professional prides wounded, they find themselves under orders to liquidate each other within 48 hours.

     It should come as no surprise that at some point Pitt and Jolie will stop trading shots with each other and turn their guns on their employers to save their own lives. In fact, there are not a lot of surprises at all in the film’s script, which merely serves as a hook on which to hang the interaction of its two leads. In point of fact, Mr & Mrs. Smith is nothing more than a vehicle for its two leads, a movie that survives solely on the power of the chemistry between Pitt and Jolie. The movie thrives on the playful interchange between its two stars and slows considerably whenever the pair are not sharing screen time. The duo manage to carry both quieter scenes - such as those in the beginning depicting their crumbling, cold marriage and visits to a marriage counselor - as well as the more action-oriented sequences with equal aplomb. Never mind what gossip may have generated about the two’s privates lives while the film was in production, what matters here is the performances on the screen.

     The script does build a few nice action set pieces, which director Doug (The Bourne Identity) Liman handles well, particularly a car chase featuring Pitt and Jolie in a minivan which makes imaginative use of the vehicle’s sliding doors and hatchback. However, there are definitely some silly moments and questionable logic in the script. Does anyone think it is a good idea to store guns and live ammunition in a secret compartment under a stove? But Liman keeps things moving along briskly, and teamed with the winning combination of Pitt and Jolie, these lapses don’t occur to the audience until much later on the drive home from the theatre.