Mr. & Mrs. Smith
I had zero intentions of seeing this film. The preview, the idea, the fact it was a remake, the Brad/Jen/Angelina crap, everything about it turned me right off. The only niggling thing in my mind was that the director was Doug Liman, the man behind Swingers who defied expectations once before with The Bourne Identity, carving an excellently innovative film out of the action spy-thriller genre block when few thought he could. So after much umming and ahhing I decided to give it a go, give Liman the benefit of the doubt.
And doubt there was. A wife and husband, both skilled assassins, married for years without knowing of the other’s secret life. It’s a fucking stale idea. I’m bored just reading that sentence. I expected a few hours of War Of The Roses type antics, the "will they kiss or kill each other?" type friction, and a slew of cutesy marriage jokes: “Y’know honey, killing the President of Mongolia is a lot like eating your pot roast – a deadly endeavour!!!” or “This is for not putting the toilet seat down!” – cue gun fire, wait for laughs.
It’s not quite that bad, but gets close. Some of the inevitable back-and-forth relationship banter actually bordered on endearing (I particularly liked the one about Jolie’s character having hired actors to play her parents – and her husband recognising her “dad” from his former acting role on Fantasy Island), but they grow tiresome very quickly as they expand and multiply.
The action side of things fares slightly better. Liman doesn’t quite inject it with the same novel frantic energy he brought to Bourne but his direction of these scenes still stands out from a lot of the Bruckheimer standard bullshit. When the couple first find each other’s true identities out, and have a feisty gun-toting domestic spat before some violent house-destroying make-up sex, the film threatens to get entertaining but ultimately shies away from any such promise.
The film fails because, simply, it makes no fucking sense. There’s no story here to follow. They find out they’re spies, they try to kill each other, then they team up to stop others killing them. That’s it. It’s a premise, not a story. If you’ve seen the preview well that’s the whole damn movie. That leaves a lot of pressure on the relationship between the two characters to carry the film, and it is not totally without its charm. Pitt and Jolie have great chemistry – obviously – but Jolie really hasn’t really earned her acting stripes yet and seems to have nothing to balance all these Tomb Raider-y fluff action chick roles with. Pitt is at his lazy worst, relying on his smile and charisma to coast through the same way Tom Cruise does in almost every single film he has ever been in. Pitt really needs a strong character to sink his teeth into, and without anything to work with doesn’t seem willing to push himself to create anything outside of the ‘cool guy’ persona he keeps on standby for crap like Oceans 11 and 12.
The end is a pitiful anti-climax where nothing at all is wrapped up – but then again there’s really no plot to wrap up. Explain this to me: the independent agencies Mr and Mrs Smith work for a team-up to kill them both because it’s bad for business for the two agencies to work together. Che? Let’s go over that again: the rival organisations team up because there was a threat of teaming up between the rival organisations. Yeah. They don’t even try to explain it, which is probably for the best, but crap, what a half thought-out concept. So when the film ends with a pointless drawn-out shootout between the now happily married couple (nothing like a gun battle to resolve all former tension) and the faceless bad guys, not explaining a single thing (especially why after the battle the Smiths are now all of a sudden magically safe from their former employers who have been trying to kill them for the whole film) my reaction was just: Shit, that’s it? That’s the film? Where exactly is the third act? It never ceases to amaze me that folk in Hollywoodland just don’t seem to catch on that all the money, star prowess, and talented directors in the world just can’t salvage a script so unremarkable and unoriginal that it really isn’t worth shitting on.