Plot less, over-stylised action-comedy that relies too heavily on its star duo.

Rating: 4/10 (23 January 2008)

You'd expect more from a film directed by Doug Liman than the meagre fare offered in "Mr And Mrs Smith". Liman was the director behind strongly characterised movies like "Swingers" and "Go". But in "Mr And Mrs Smith", there is precious little story and everything depends on the sex appeal generated by the film's two stars. A genuine case of style over substance. The problem is that sexual chemistry on its own  with no discernible plot to back it up  cannot sustain a film over a two hour running time. As gorgeous as Brad and Angelina might be to their respective army of fans, they are badly let down in this film by Simon Kinberg's threadbare script.
During some kind of military crisis in Colombia, American man John Smith (Brad Pitt) meets an American girl named Jane (Angelina Jolie). Since all lone Americans are being thoroughly checked out by the Colombian authorities, the pair of them hook up to draw attention away from themselves. Five or six years later, we catch up with the couple again and discover that in the interim they have got married. Now an unhappily married couple with a glamorous house, glamorous cars but no connection between them, the Smiths' relationship is hanging by a thread. It turns out, however, that each has been deceiving the other about what they really do for a living. John is an assassin working for a secret undercover organisation; Jane is also an assassin working for a rival company. Neither of them has the faintest inkling of how the other earns a living. John and Jane are assigned by their respective bosses to carry out a hit on the same target in the desert near the Mexican border. Upon arriving at the scene, they get in each other's way and foul-up the assignment. Worse still, they begin a no-holds-barred campaign to kill each other in order to restore their reputation within their departments. But it slowly becomes clear that the trigger-happy couple are actually perfectly suited for each other, especially now that their dark secrets are out. Will they kill each other, or combine their talents to fight back against the organisations that have made them into what they are?
The premise is reasonable enough, though wholly unlikely. And the film gets off to a breezy start as the truth about John and Jane is slowly revealed to the audience. Things take a rapid downward turn once the couple learn the truth about each other. At this point, all semblance of credibility is tossed aside and the film goes into comedy-action overdrive. The deadly lovers try various methods of eliminating each other in increasingly stylised set pieces; the narrative collapses and becomes an over-the-top parade of one-upmanship. Pitt and Jolie convey an effective mix of tension and desire between each other, but by this stage the story has abandoned them and the entire film is running solely on their personalities. They try gamely  but it's ultimately a losing battle. Each shootout becomes more contrived and stylised than the last, culminating in a staggeringly dumb department store gunfight. "Mr and Mrs Smith" makes no pretences of reality, and is intentionally tongue-in-cheek, but somewhere along the line the non-stop banter and killing cease to be amusing and the film becomes something of a bore.