PLOT: A suburban couple played by Jolie and Pitt hide their true identities from one another and live the lie, dooming the marriage. They're both spy assassins and soon the truth will endanger them both.
If Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt did not sleep together during the filming of their sensuous spy movie, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, they should have. These two just sizzle together on screen.
The Jolie-Pitt combo reminds us what movie star sexual chemistry is all about. They both look beautiful, their interaction is incendiary and you feel the heat radiating off the screen. Spontaneous combustion is a constant threat, even though there is barely any skin flashed. Jolie's left nipple is seen for a nano-second. Everything else is created by innuendo, provocative poses, suggestive dialogue.
Personally, I don't give a toss what these two are up to in their private lives in terms of sexual shenanigans. But director Doug Liman, who successfully paired Matt Damon with sultry German star Franka Potente in The Bourne Identity, struck gold when Jolie teamed up with Pitt for his new flick.
Each is a spy-assassin working for an anonymous agency that is off the government radar screen. Neither has ever let the other know of his or her true identity. As a result, their five- or six-year marriage (an inside joke), is on the rocks, a victim of lies. They resort to a marriage counsellor or shrink in the opening scene (which serves as a way to introduce a flashback to how they first met in Bogota). Inevitably, their career trajectories will soon cross. A deadly crisis is coming.
It should be said that sex appeal is not the only appealing factor in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Despite the dull title slapped on this flick, the movie is an absolute blast. It is a summer popcorn flick that snaps, crackles and pops with energy.
Just don't go if you abhor violence. Liman packs the frame with wall-to-wall mayhem. There is a staggering body count by the end as mobs of anonymous spies and assorted baddies are gunned down, stabbed, crushed, garrotted and otherwise dispatched with barely a death rattle to remind us of their humanity. It is all done in a briskly paced, hyper-surreal way, as Robert Rodriguez would do in one of his action pictures.
And the settings, from Italy to the Brooklyn Bridge and from Manhattan to the desolate Johnson Valley in California, have a burnished beauty that is as gorgeous as Jolie and Pitt.
Critically, the only blood shed is splattered on the two stars. In one sequence, the movie even gives the old "sex & violence" approach to entertainment a bizarre new twist.
So, if that sort of thing distresses you, take the kids to a family comedy such as Madagascar. But, if you do like that sort of thing, this is an example of just how good it can get.
As written by Simon Kinberg and directed so smoothly by Liman, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is an absurd action plot taken to such extremes that it merely serves the romantic and comic themes.
Both Jolie and Pitt toss their lines off with casual aplomb, as if their butts and even their lives were not on the line.
Others, especially Vince Vaughn as Pitt's sidekick, and Angela Bassett, Kerry Washington, Adam Brody and even screenwriter Kinberg as an investment banker, are the perfect foils that bring out the best in the banter between the two stars.
As a result, the movie really is funny: Funny-sly, funny-clever and funny-cool.
(This film is rated PG)
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