The Unseen Movie Review

Mr And Mrs Smith

After his recreation of the spy genre with 2002’s gritty amnesia flick The Bourne Supremacy, this initially seems like a rather odd choice for former indy wunderkind Doug Liman, who first came to the world’s attention with the casually witty 1996 buddy comedy Swingers. After all, it’s a remake – and not of the rather weak 1941 Alfred Hitchcock comedy of the same name, but of an even weaker, quickly cancelled television series from the mid-1990s starring Quantum Leap and Star Trek: Enterprise’s Scott Bakula. On the surface, it’s not a very auspicious start.

But no one really cares about the director here – it’s Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie everyone will be going to see. The rumours of a blossoming on-set romance between the two stars, each entirely rightly counted as among the most gorgeous people in the world, will be more than enough to pique the interests of the gossip column-reading crowds. It’s like Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, Cruise and Cruz in Vanilla Sky or Hepburn and Tracy in Woman of the Year all over again. The fact that both actors are – at least, when they try – masters of their craft is simply an added bonus.

So – talented director, two insanely good-looking leads that rumour has it are an item in the real world. The plot seems pretty much irrelevant by this stage – which is probably just as well, because it’s insanely silly.

Pitt and Jolie are an increasingly bored married couple – disillusioned with their humdrum life together and heading towards a breakup. But – wait for it – they are both highly-trained assassins, working for competing organisations under secret identities so closely-guarded that even husband and wife don’t know about each other’s alternate lives. Sure enough, they are hired to kill each other – still unaware how very well they know their targets.

Cue the firing of ridiculously improbable weaponry and resultant huge explosions, viciously-choreographed hand-to-hand combat, spectacular stunts (and, for Jolie, costumes which will turn the men in the audience into gibbering wrecks) and – naturally – the slow rekindling of the Smiths’ initial romance long after they thought it was as dead as their masters want them to be.

Naturally enough with such a concept, this could have simply been a nonsense blockbuster. The basic idea behind it is, after all, somewhat reminiscent of the dumb but fun 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle True Lies, where the Governator’s James Bondish secret agent ended up going up against a group of international bad guys while trying to keep his wife in the dark.

Thankfully, however, the sheer talent involved both in front of and behind the cameras here ensure that this is a cut above the usual summer fair. It’s still basically a big dumb blockbuster, but with a panache and self-awareness that will ensure it’s practically impossible not to love it.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM