CineScene--By and For Movie Lovers

Love is a Battlefield

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Marriage becomes metaphor in Doug Liman's much anticipated summer simmer, the off-white spy rom-com Mr. & Mrs. Smith , where one settled, suburban, and (hardly convincingly) sparkless every-couple (of Hollywood sorts) trades in the traditional marital war of attrition ("They all try to kill you, slowly, painfully, cripplingly. . . ,") for last-man-standing , head on, hand-to-hand combat. ("You still alive, baby?"). The metaphor is made possible by the gimmick: John Smith and Jane Smith are undercover assassins answering to competing bosses (by what motivation, or for what causes, we never know - though it's reasonably apparent that he works for Mars, she, Venus, etc.). As with any married couple, neither knows the other is keeping deep dark secrets until they catch each other in their sights. And then they start shooting.

Eschewing the darkness that makes the sizzle most sexy, and barely limning the link between foul play and foreplay (a stab, a blast, an explosion now and again), the screenplay for Mr. & Mrs. Smith , by Simon Kinberg, stumbles into silliness too often to keep the tension taut. But his gaze, her mouth, and steamy reports of real life misadventure help serve up sex icons Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as enviably bedded, wedded and disconnected spouses who gun for each other between sessions with the counselor. Killer appeal, indeed.

Make no mistake, though. Comparisons between this and Danny Devito's War of the Roses are completely inapt. No dogs are patéd here to make a point, no precious figurines smashed for spite. Rather than draw on the evolution from love to intolerance and meanness of spirit, Mr. & Mrs. Smith ( no relation to the Hitchcock film with Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard) tries to tease out the hairline thread dangling between lust and launching grenades. Banter and bullets fly randomly, missing their marks with equal frequency. ("I missed you today," she coos in double entendre after failing to bring him down; "I missed you, too," he returns, with shared duplicity). He flashes a lazy you-know-you-want-me grin; she flashes a come-hither-and-dress-me-up-in-leather challenge. You keep waiting for one of them to pull the ever-ready trigger. It's enough to titillate both a generalized PG-13 audience and a public following salacious off-screen suggestion. But the film also wants to be more.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith wants to be a satirical look at the foundation of committed coupledom. Like 1994's True Lies, it takes as its starting point the premise that we ground the sharing of our lives in secrets and deceptions. ("There's just this huge space between us, and it just keeps filling up with everything we don't say to each other," she laments, "what's that called?" "Marriage," comes the response.) But unlike the earlier film, which itself makes no pretense of greatness, this one plays the claim for a one-note set of laughs. The aliased icons meet hot and connect sleek in circumstances that would make even the most trusting of us curious. They lie about everything from their parents to their musical tastes. But it never is clear why all the lies are necessary. (Is a penchant for Air Supply really likely to give away that someone is a paid assassin?) Truth be told, Spy vs. Spy is more integrated conceptually; and dares to walk a blacker line.

As far as blackness goes, the only one fully aligned with the brimstone path of the genre is Vince Vaughn, whose character, Eddie, seems to have traveled in from the set of some yet-to-be-named Joe Dante affair. Though not quite at his Clay Pigeons creepiest, Vaughn has his finger on the pulse of offbeat lunacy in his portrayal of John Smith's boss and confidant. A nice mixing of the talents of Liman and Vaughn, Eddie's distrust-turned-disdain of women is played with just the right sense of self (but not self-conscious) mockery, and at just the right decibel.

Liman's directorial style is casual and unhurried, and the film carries us easily (if not quite swiftly enough) through its running time, but the strength of the film is more in its personalities than in its structure or its denouement. The boredom is never borne out, the beatings are too shy of blood, and neither Pitt's GQ ease of movement nor Jolie's Frederick's of Hollywood kink lends itself to the portrayal of a stifling social state. The plotline's key and its twists, involving the O.C. 's Adam Brody in full goofy sardonic mode, is riddled with holes you could drive a tank through (the character is even nicknamed "Tank.").

But enough about all that. Mr. & Mrs. Smith does work in what counts most: chemistry. It would have been better had it been combustible (or rated R) -- had it gone for the black gold and ended ten or so minutes before it did in slo-mo to freeze, but it would not have had the same People pleasing oomph. Liman chose instead to ring the celebrity sex symbol bell, and leave us salivating in vicarious anticipation.