A Joyless and Mind-Numbing Five Hours

Rating: 3/10 (24 June 2005)

It sure seemed like five hours, I was checking my watch every five minutes; about the same as for "King Arthur" and "Electra", but a little less than "Catwoman". It tries to blend the domestic-secret agent concept from "True Lies" but has none of the charm of that movie. It rips off "The Big Hit" for most of its action sequences and for what passes as comedy. But the big hit looks much better, only cost $13 Million, and gives viewers two much sexier actresses, China Chow and Christina Applegate (and a better looking hero-Mark Wahlberg).
I truly cannot imagine anyone with even an average level of intelligence or sophistication enjoying this thing. It is just one pointless bit of excess after another. Don't worry about the plot because the writer, director, and editor apparently did not bother to include one. And it's not really an action picture even though there is one mind-numbing CG enhanced action sequence after another.
What saves this from a complete suck-fest is that Pitt and Jolie seem to be having fun together on the screen. But now I understand Jolie's latest comments about giving up her acting career, there can't be much professional satisfaction making crap like this so unless you need the money why bother. I will miss being amused thinking about how much her face resembles what Jessica Alba would see if she looked at herself in a warped fun house mirror.
The 100 million dollar cost of this movie was only 35 million less than Spielberg's "War of the Worlds". While very little of this budget found its way onto the screen, the movie is having no trouble generating enough box office to cover the cost. So my finding it incomprehensible that anyone would find it entertaining is pretty much irrelevant. ECON 101 tells us that people would not shell out money to see this if they did not derive considerable utility from the viewing (maybe even multiple viewings).
As long as some of this type of stuff makes money, Hollywood will churn it out. And as American citizens this is really more about embarrassment than anything else since we are not being forced to watch it. Whether you blame our education process, our gene pool, or just our culture; the fact is that pretty much the whole rest of the world feels a collective superiority every time we crank out something this moronic and devour it like a bunch of rubes who just saw their first moving picture.
So you can understand the laments that Hollywood big movies are killing intelligent cinema. But if it is any consolation I just caught the ending of the original 1976 version of "Freaky Friday", which featured car chase and water ski sequences almost as moronic the action sequences in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith". This in spite of a cast that included Jodie Foster, John Astin, and Barbara Harris (fresh off her fantastic performance in "Nashville"). In the almost 30 years since, the industry has managed to crank out an impressive number of so-called blockbusters that were actually pretty good, and the independent film movement has hung in there and produced some truly fantastic films. So maybe things are not as bleak as they seem while suffering through "Mr. & Mrs. Smith".
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.