A wasted opportunity.

Rating: 3/10 (12 November 2007)

Mr. & Mrs. Smith is set in New York where married couple John (Brad Pitt) & Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie) live out an unhappy existence together, what they don't know however is that they are both top secret highly trained assassins who work for different shadowy organisations. Unfortunately their respective employers discover they are married & send them both on the same mission in an attempt to have them both kill each other, the plan fails & Mr. & Mrs. Smith team up to take on their employers who want them dead at all costs...
Directed by Doug Liman this has to be one of the very worst big budget overblown Hollywood action adventure films ever made, I personally hated it. The script by Simon Kinberg apparently went through over fifty drafts with at least nine writers working on it during it's production & one has to say it's sort of noticeable since it's a mess. I found it impossible to relate to anyone or anything in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the fact they two leads are ruthless assassins who seem to make a sh*t load of money & somehow are oblivious to what the other does (for five or six years) is so far fetched & fanciful they might as well have been aliens from Mars for all the reality on show here. Then there's the fact I just didn't like either character at all, the secondary character's are given absolutely nothing to do & various character's were actually cut from the film completely including the final showdown with Mr. & Mrs. Smith's bosses. I also found it lacking in decent action scenes, there's a few explosions & some really dull shoot-outs where the predictably invincible Mr. & Mrs. Smith shoot & kill all the bad guy's without getting so much as a scratch on themselves despite having rocket launchers fired at them, explosions going off around them & being significantly out numbered. Also, when they do get shot repeatedly it's revealed they both have bullet proof vests on which is fine but why didn't the otherwise heavily armed bad guy's wear bullet proof vests as well? This is just a lame, boring, silly, dull, stupid & utterly predictable waste of $110,000,000. As an action film it doesn't satisfy, as a comedy film it's not funny, as a romance it fails & as a drama it's so far removed from reality they might as well have cast two Teletubbies in the leading roles!
Director Liman had a huge budget at his disposable so how he managed to turn in such an unexciting film as this is beyond me. Seriously everything was here for a cracking action adventure, the huge budget, the A-list Hollywood stars, the backing of a major studio & a potentially fun story but nothing works in my opinion. There's a mildly entertaining car chase which dwells more on a domestic argument between Mr. & Mrs. Smith than actual vehicular mayhem & an OK CGI computer effect of the Smith's house blowing up (yes, despite being only a few feet away they get up & walk away without so much as a bruise) but surprisingly very little else to get the blood pumping. Maybe I'm expecting too much but a pointlessly one sided shoot-out in a superstore at the end just isn't enough to get me excited. A mixture of real stunts & CGI computer effects you can tell the difference & the scene when the women slide across New York skyscrapers on wires is just ridiculous. Probably the most memorable part of Mr. & Mrs. Smith is Angelina Jolie as a dominatrix which is shown in all the trailers, unfortunately the scene in question in reality lasts for all of 30 seconds. In fact I'd say Mr. & Mrs. Smith is one of those films which makes for a brilliant trailer, the sort of film which give publicists wet dreams as there are lots of great looking moments to edit into a three minute trailer but when you watch the finished film those are the only good bits in it!
With an obscene budget of about $110,000,000 I can't really see where the money went although Jolie & Pitt didn't exactly come cheap, the action really isn't that good & there's not that much of it either. Nicole Kidman was originally cast as Mrs. Smith but dropped out while Gwen Stefani, Catherine Zeta-Jones & Cate Blanchett were also considered before the terrible Jolie got the part & was reportedly paid an absolutely criminal $20,000,000 for a truly awful performance. Meanwhile Johnny Depp was cast as Mr. Smith but later turned it down & Will Smith was also considered before Pitt got the part & was also paid an extortionate $20,000,000 for turning in a terrible performance. Nice work if you can get it I suppose. The rest of the cast barely figure & have nothing to do at all.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith could have been brilliant, in the hands of a decent action director I'm sure the $110,000,000 could have been put to good use to make an exciting & fun James Bond type action adventure, as it is were left with this boring family friendly crap mixture of action, romance & comedy. So much potential yet so much disappointment.