Shiny People and Shiny Things

Rating: 4/10 (16 June 2005)

Full of actors pretending to be assassins pretending to be boring suburbanites, "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" never convinces that it's anything more than famous people surrounded by shiny things, and doesn't seem to be trying too hard to do so. It's as if the film is so proud of having people as pretty as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie together on screen that it figures any characters they create couldn't possibly be as interesting as, well, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" feels entitled to pile contrivance upon contrivance, at times undermining its own logic, to allow Mr. and Mrs. Pitt-Jolie to slap and tickle their way through all manner of gun play and combustion.
John and Jane Smith, a couple of happily hired killers who ice skels before heading to the neighbors' cocktail party, have managed "five or six" years of marriage without realizing the truth about each other. Well, at least one of them has. After their respective Murder, Inc's send them to the same hit, they ID one another and are each given 48 hours to eliminate the other. This is unfortunate, not least because it requires them to turn their sprawling faux colonial into bullet casserole. As far as I could tell, the only reason either heads home is to participate in a lengthy shootout in which exploding drywall serves as an aphrodisiac. It's one of many sequences in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" that exists only for its own sake. There's a set up and a double cross that eventually lead the pair to shoot at things other than each other, and to realize that, dammit, a relationship between merciless, competing guns-for-hire CAN succeed in spite of the odds.
"Mr. and Mrs. Smith" affects a forced whimsy that signals it's not to be taken seriously, but even so, virtually nothing that takes place in the film is at all necessary. One would think Charlie's Angels-type professional hit squads would be able to handle their own internal issues without conspiring with their competitors in an elaborate scheme to wipe out one of their own. Likewise, having been assigned to the relationship as a cover, it seems odd that one of the two would then be marked for death for being in that very relationship. But to heed such nitpicking would leave little cause for mayhem, and would expose the near total lack of chemistry between what admittedly must be one of the most beautiful couples ever to grace the screen. Without the able support of Vince Vaugh, here as so often the best thing in the film, "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" would be virtually humorless. It wants the taste of Brad and Angelina it dishes to us to be enough, an appalling display of laziness and condescension. If that's all you're looking for, any recent issue of People magazine can give you the same punch far less expensively.