Fails to deliver on premise

Rating: 5/10 (18 August 2005)

Clever conceit for a spy thriller which has plenty of good stuff but is ultimately not as satisfying as it could be. Both John (Pitt) and Jane Smith (Jolie) are secret agents and have hidden their real jobs from each other; however, how they accomplish this secrecy is one of many elements that is poorly explored in the film. The rigors each would have to go to keep their real jobs secret could have generated several fun and inventive scenes.
When the movie begins, they are in marriage counseling. The counseling sessions with the unseen counselor are the best thing about the film, but is yet one more under-utilized motif. The disintegration of their initial passion is one of the many elements of the clever conceit that if explored could have made the film better.
Both unexplored story lines would have delayed the heart of the film's plot. When the Smiths find themselves given the same job by the competing agencies for whom they work, they are set to kill each other as part of their normal witness-removing procedures. However, they find it difficult to kill each other. Not just because they're good at their jobs, and they are, but because they both discover the awakening of feelings they have for each other. The attempts on each other's lives culminate in a home-destroying shoot 'em up conflagration that has the neighbors calling the police and has the two secret agents making mad, reckless, passionate love among the broken glass, shattered furniture, and assorted wreckage of their once lovely home.
This sex scene brings forward a theme from which the filmmakers carefully keep a distance. The violence of their lives carries over into the violence of their sex. At first, it seems that John will be dishing out a beating as foreplay to his wife and not taking it until she clocks him hard in the jaw and mounts him. Though the women-like-it-rough misogyny is thankfully avoided, the film is full of sexist choices despite its attempts to establish Jolie in a feminist design.
In the one job we see each perform, John (Pitt) is given a stereotypically masculine-style job. He must infiltrate a poker game pretending to be a drunk looking for the bathroom. He then makes the hit when the missing player arrives. Meanwhile, Jane (Jolie) dresses up in dominatrix gear and visits a mob boss and uses her sex to get close enough to break his neck. Though Jane shows prowess later with computers, bombs, guns, knives, cars, and more, this choice is disappointing and exploitative, though she does have a cool getaway with a bag handle that unfurls a tension wire and allows her to drop twenty stories off a balcony and into a waiting cab.
This sexist division of roles is evident throughout the movie. Jane has her hidden weapons cache in the kitchen whereas John's is under the garage. Also, John's work comrade and friend, Eddie (Vince Vaughn), is given some real screen time and a character, though his function in or out of John's organization is left very very unclear, especially later in the film when he receives a cell phone message to kill both Jane and John. Jane is surrounded by women in her agency, which is curious and begging for exploration in and of itself, but her associates, though named in the cast list, are given only a few lines and not characterized like Eddie.
But the film takes steps to make a show of not being sexist, probably unaware of the messages of these other choices. When re-arming themselves under attacks by both of their agencies, Jane asks John: "why do I get the girl gun?" And John trades weapons with her. This comment is also part of the bickering as the characters begin to confess the truth to each other, while on the run from both agencies who are trying to kill them. This bickering becomes one of the film's best comic elements. Thankfully, they do not make Jane into a nag and make John as much of a fuss budget as Jane.
But here too, they make the same sexist choices. In the job to get the target of the hit that they both botched when put on the same job, it is John who does the field work and Jane who stays behind to coordinate. Then when John is impulsive and disobeys Jane's orders, she looks like a failure.
In the end, though, they're both failures as the initial hit was a setup. Their respective agencies found out that they were married and put them on the same job to have them eliminate each other. When that doesn't happen, both agencies send dozens of agents, special forces, black, ninja troopers, after Jane and John.
And so faced with fleeing and being on the run forever, Jane and John suit up and arm themselves and make like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But unlike the Newman-Redford epic, the two gunslingers don't jump off to certain death gun blazing. Here, they go into the fight, and we get to see them miraculously kill dozens of specially trained assassins.
The film ends with the now happy and successful couple telling their marriage counselor that they have solved their problems. But this final scene brings home the film's greatest weakness. Why do they discover that they love each other? The sex is steamy and wild. The players pretty and great to look at (Jolie is a hottie), but is that love? No. Ultimately, the film fails to deliver on the promise of its clever concept.