director
Doug Liman
screenwriter
Simon Kinberg
producers
Lucas Foster
Akiva Goldsman
Eric McLeod
Arnon Milchan
Patrick Wachsberger
cinematographer
Bojan Bazelli
music
John Powell
editor
Michael Tronick
cast
Brad Pitt (John Smith)
Angelina Jolie (Jane Smith)
Adam Brody (Benjamin)
Keith David (Boss)
Vince Vaughn (Eddie)
Kerry Washington (Jasmine)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 120m
u.s.
release: 6/10/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other doug
liman films
reviewed on this website:
- the
bourne identity
- go
- swingers
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Assassins are lovable and attractive;
at least, that's what movie after movie tells us. Hollywood filmmakers,
who know a thing or two about taking soulless jobs for the money,
are mesmerized by the cool amorality of people who kill for a
living (as well as the potential for action blowouts in which
dozens of people drop like flies and the audience doesn't have
to care). Some movies use the hit-man as a useful launchpad for
commentary: Grosse
Pointe Blank, for instance, was a slyly satirical
view of middle-class mores, and last summer's Collateral
explored the human cost of murder for hire. Mr. and Mrs. Smith,
with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as a married couple who don't
know they're also rival assassins, is a jovial, half-smart domestic
comedy in which domesticity itself is a joke.
John (Pitt) and Jane (Jolie)
have settled into a lucrative rut together. Each thinks the other
is in some fat-paycheck line of work that keeps them out of the
house a lot. The amount of elaborate deception required to sustain
their mutual lie isn't credible in the least, but we'll let that
pass. The movie's bottom line is the pairing of Pitt and Jolie,
and the happy (or not so happy for Jennifer Aniston) accident
of their apparently having become a real-life couple during filming.
How's their chemistry? Well, they're both in on the joke, and
they both know how to keep themselves amused in big-budget spectacles.
Certainly they lack the sparks that, say, John Cusack and Minnie
Driver shared in Grosse Pointe Blank. Part of the
movie's point is that John and Jane are bored with each other
until they're trying to kill each other, and that part of the
film doesn't last very long.
I suppose it's useless to expect
wit and elegance from a movie like this. Mr. and Mrs. Smith
is amusing, but only in the "surprisingly not-infantile
for a $100 million summer action flick" sense of the word.
Vince Vaughn, dropping in now and then as John's crony in assassination,
scores some laughs but reminds us how far he and his director
here, Doug Liman, have come -- or fallen -- since their mutual
debut in Liman's 1996 indie comedy Swingers.
I wasn't a fan of that film, but it caught the pulse of something
real, and Liman's next feature, 1999's Go,
was a chaotic little sweetheart of a Gen-X comedy. Since then,
though, Liman has gravitated to impersonal big-budget thrills,
with 2002's The
Bourne Identity and now this. The Liman of nine years
ago might've cast Vince Vaughn as John and perhaps Janeane Garofalo
as Jane, and allowed the film to rest on intelligence instead
of concussive action climaxes.
The film's structure is predictable
in every beat. John and Jane are set against each other, then
rediscover their passion for one another and band together against
their mutual enemy. (It isn't a black, bleak comedy like The
War of the Roses, ending in degradation and death
for them both.) For what seems like forever, the movie devolves
into duck/cover/shoot, in which the heroes' virtuosity with firearms
somehow means that the six hundred trained assassins shooting
at them are all lousy shots. A car chase in a stolen SUV has
comic potential, starting off with Air Supply's plaintively nerdy
"Making Love Out of Nothing at All" oozing out of the
car radio and featuring Brad Pitt briefly making hostile use
of a golf club, but it eventually peters out. Just because Liman
has found himself at the wheel of two action movies doesn't make
him an action director.
For a brief moment, when John
and Jane are joined in an embrace while firing guns in opposite
directions -- like a romantic parody of John Woo -- I dared to
hope that Mr. and Mrs. Smith would end on a high operatic
note: the killer lovers going out with guns blazing and tongues
entwined. But the movie is bracketed by the couple's visits to
an offscreen therapist, and we're to understand that the whole
experience has brought them closer. No fallout from all the people
they've killed, no further danger from whoever wanted them dead,
no competitiveness between each other. The upper-class killers,
smirking at us from the screen at the end, are validated in their
highly lucrative and destructive lifestyle choice. I guess that's
less tiresome than the "crime does not pay" punishments
of much older movies, but it still leaves a sour taste in one's
mouth.
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