Overkill ...

Rating: 5/10 (22 July 2005)

MR. AND MRS. SMITH begins like a Woody Allen movie. John and Jane Smith sit looking at the camera, talking to the disembodied voice of a marriage counselor, revealing bits of their marital woes through awkward attempts at casual humor. It is a nice beginning, but totally misleading. What seems to be developing into a clever, bittersweet, sophisticated drama about a failing marriage evolves into a tiresomely violent and overwrought video game tale of suburban warfare.
The twist, which the film treats as a surprise even though it is made apparent in all the advance advertising, is that John and Jane are paid assassins working for two rival, unidentified government agencies. They marry not knowing each other's little secret, which should indicate just how incompetent they are at their jobs. Then for reasons that are never made clear, they are assigned to kill each other. The result is the battle of the sexes as an extreme sport.
It is an insipid idea for a movie, yet nonetheless intriguing: taking domestic violence out of the hands of amateurs and leaving it to the professionals. And as long as the cat and mouse bloodlust between John and Jane remains personal, the film has a sharp satirical edge. The battle of the sexes becomes more than a just an ironic metaphor. The problem is that the film doesn't know where to stop and a screenplay that wants to become more and more outrageous ends up just getting more and more stupid. It is alleged that the screenplay went through fifty drafts and presumably each successive screenwriter added a "wouldn't it be cool if ..." moment that prompted them to exaggerate everything. When it takes on dimensions that would even be embarrassingly unbelievable in a James Bond movie, the result is like THE WAR OF THE ROSES on LSD: coyly malevolent but utterly incoherent.
As the Smiths, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have a fair amount of chemistry, most apparent in a dinner sequence where paranoia and cunning are served up along with tainted roast beef and extremely sharp carving knives. But as they tango through scenes of bickering sarcasm their witty banter literally gets drowned out by explosions, gunfire and squealing automobile tires. Then, even though it rushes to resolve the conflict between the Smiths, the film drags on for another ultra-violent thirty minutes designed to -- but totally failing at -- explaining the plot's myriad loopholes. The film ends with a smug happily-ever-after in which nothing has been resolved.
Ultimately, the film has no real point. As it systematically destroys all the symbols of middle-American bliss -- marriage, suburban home, mini-van, etc. -- one suspects that the original screenplay for MR. AND MRS. SMITH hoped to join the ranks of THE WAR OF THE ROSES; DIVORCE, AMERlCAN STYLE and even WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLFE? as a brittle commentary on the decline of the American family. But the right to even be compared to such films apparently was written out of the story during all those revisions, with any sharp insights gunned down by all the high-tech pyrotechnics. A film focusing on adult themes sells out totally to juvenile comic book mayhem.