Mr. & Mrs. Smith
There is a kind of movie that consists of watching two people together on the screen. What matters is the ’’chemistry, ’’ a term that once referred to a science but now refers to the heat we sense, or think we sense, between two movie stars. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have it, or I think they have it, in ’’Mr. and Mrs. Smith, ’’ and because they do, the movie works. If they did not, there’d be nothing to work with.
Pitt and Jolie play John and Jane Smith, almost certainly not their real names, who met in Bogota ’’five or six’’ years ago, got married and settled down to a comfortable suburban lifestyle while not revealing to each other that they are both skilled assassins. John keeps his guns and money in a pit beneath the tool shed. Jane keeps her knives and other weapons in trays that slide out from under the oven.
As the movie opens, they’re in marriage counseling; the spark has gone out of their relationship. On a typical day, they set off separately to their jobs: He to kill three or four guys, she to pose as a dominatrix while snapping a guy’s neck.
John and Jane individually receive instructions to travel to a desert location and take out a mysterious target. They travel there separately, only to discover that their targets are each other. It’s one of those situations where they could tell each other, but then they’d have to kill each other. ’’If you two stay together, you’re dead, ’’ says Eddie another tough guy, who lives at home with his mother because it’s convenient and she cooks good and on and on.
The question becomes: Do John and Jane kill each other like the professionals they are, or do they team up to save their lives?After physical violence which should theoretically have broken every bone in both their beautiful bodies, they get so excited that, yes guys, they have sex, which in their case seems to involve both the martial and marital arts.
The movie pauses from time to time for more sessions with the marriage counselor, during which it appears that professional killing is good for their relationship. After we get our money’s worth of action, their problems are resolved, more or less. Although many lives have been lost, the marriage is saved.
None of this matters at all. What makes the movie work is that Pitt and Jolie have fun together on the screen, and they did justice to their roles.