Movie Review: The Things I Do For Love: Mr. and Mrs. Smith

My opinion of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie is well-documented. Consequently, my desire to see "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" was up there with my desire to keep pet spiders.

The Spouse, however, is a lovely man and sometimes spending time with him trumps things like my vow to boycott all things Brangelina. Plus, I thought, it would be an interesting intellectual exercise to see if I could watch and review a movie with pure journalistic objectivity.

I began poorly, visibly wincing and making little "ick" noises. The Spouse paused the movie (I believe the opening credits were still rolling) and sweetly asked, "Would you feel better if you were wearing your Team Aniston shirt?"

I donned it and yes, it helped. My loyalties affirmed, I gutted up to watch.

The premise is well known. 2 professional killers meet and marry, each thinking the other has a regular job. 5 or 6 years into the marriage they are in counseling, bored with each other, still keeping their big secret. They end up being hired by their respective employers to do the same job, managing to bollocks it and leaving the target alive. Then, because apparently this is how it works in the assassin business, they are to eliminate each other with extreme prejudice.

They have lived together for 5-6 years without copping to each other's profession but now they figure it out with blinding quickness and just as quickly and without so much as a "hey nonny nonny" set out to kill each other. Things explode.

The movie is full of chic style. It is beautifully shot, stylishly set. Jane and John Smith are beautiful people, with perfect hair, teeth, bodies and clothes. They live in a beautiful house with a well-manicured lawn. There is a faint noir-ish quality to all this, stylized and perfect. But get passed the nice drapes and the perfectly appointed this and that and you don't have much. Problem is, there's not much sense that the director, Dough Liman, intended any of these trappings as some sort of "too good to be true" symbol for the paucity of their lives or their marriage.

Brad Pitt is one of the comedic geniuses of this generation Seriously, he has a very low-key but spot on sense of timing and this movie is, first and foremost, a comedy. A grown-up, stylish comedy, but a comedy. Pitt is a master of subtle humor. And Jolie? Well, she's a skank, a ho and strikes me as terribly self-important. I hate her. But the witch can act. Her timing and manner are perfectly suited to the tone of the film. She can do more with a twitch of her (big fat stupid fake) pouty lips than many actresses can do with their entire body. The two actors are perfectly suited to their roles. Unfortunately, both of them are capable of far more range than this film allows them.

There is a very disappointing shallowness to this movie. It is neither as funny or as dramatically complex as the premise suggests it could be. Think, for example, of "Grosse Point Blank", the John Cusak film wherein an assassin returns home for his high school reunion and attempts to reconcile with his old sweetheart. The internal conflict of a hired assassin, who's job fundamentally is to have no feelings, coming to terms with his demons and finding a way to embrace life? Hey. That's comedy, people. It's also drama.

"Mr and Mrs. Smith" doesn't explore much of anything. It fails because there is, ultimately, no conflict. The screenwriter, Simon Kinberg, neither ramps up the comedy nor delves into the motivations. The fact that these 2 characters would blithely begin trying to eliminate the other, without so much as a "well, it is too bad but it must be done" is simply unbelievable. There is no suggestion that it is the big lie between them that is causing their problems. Any moral conflict about being an assassin? Nah, not so much. It is the failure to mine the rich resources of the premise that ultimately lead to making "Mr. and Mrs. smith" nothing more than an excuse to put 2 beautiful people in really nice clothes and make them shoot at each other.

The resolution of the film? Well, honestly, I fell asleep during the big shootout scene. I was, by then, rather bored with the whole thing. The bad news is, when I woke up The Spouse filled me in on the ending and basically, I didn't miss much. It ended as I suspected it would and that was that.

There's plenty of room in moviemaking for sheer fluff. This movie would definitely fall into that category. Unfortunately, it isn't fluffy enough. Even cotton candy requires some heat and air to create it's structure. This movie is more like a soap bubble, pretty when it catches the light but once it pops, there's no evidence it even existed except, possibly, for a sticky residue. (Which in this case would be the fact that the whole enterprise ended up having real life implications. The breakup of the Pitt-Aniston marriage is, it turns out, the real drama in this story).

Vince Vaughn is terribly funny as Pitt's best friend. Somehow, in all the kerfuffle about the Brangelina affair, I never noted that Vaughn was in this film. I found that terribly ironic. And musing on that fact was more engaging than most of the movie.

This is a movie that disappoints because it had the potential to be so much more. I wish the story and the execution had lived up to the hype. Pitt and Jolie are both very good actors, far more capable of depth than this movie asks of them. I wish they had been able to really pull out all the stops and deliver some passion and pathos in between the zippy yet forgettable repartee. In the end, it was a big, fat "meh" of a movie.

You can take this with a big grain of salt, but here's proof that my personal feelings weren't in the way. If you took this script and shot it in exactly the same way only casting 2 people I really like, say, Ewan McGregor and Julia Roberts, it still would have been a disappointment. All form, no substance. I hate when that happens.

The Film Czarina gives "Mr. and Mrs. Jones" 2 ½ Koihead out of 5. And she's probably being generous.