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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 15.92%
Worth A Look: 46.5%
Average: 21.02%
Pretty Bad: 8.92%
Total Crap: 7.64%
13 reviews, 79 user ratings
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| Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) |
by Paul Zimmerman
"Organized Mayhem from a Mad Genius"
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Imagine "War of the Roses" as directed by John Woo, and you pretty much have the new action romance "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" in a nutshell.After mountains of tabloid press about if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie made The Big Naughty while shooting the Doug Liman film, it finally arrives and guess what? It’s actually quite good. And quite silly. And quite a bit of fluff, but what grand fluff it is. This is due in no small part to Liman’s deft balance of action and romance and the on-screen chemistry of Pitt and Jolie. Indeed you’d have to journey back to the likes of big screen couples like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious or Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun to find nearly as much celluloid steam heat. Simply told -- the camera likes both of them, together it LOVES them.
Being the story of two charming (and beautiful) hit men who don’t realize the other holds a very dark secret, at heart Smith and Smith is a relationship comedy about how couples grow apart. How far apart? So far they not only don’t notice the other one is secretly a hit man (or woman), they also fail to notice there’s enough firepower hidden beneath their immaculately designed house to arm a state’s worth of Minute Men. The film is divided into three neat sections with the final third testing an audience’s patience for exploding things and colliding coincidences. That Pitt, Jolie and Liman can sell such a farfetched tale is no small feat. And one of the film’s blessings is not what it does but instead what it doesn’t do. One would expect given that both Smiths are betrayed by their respective bosses that taking down said bosses would make up the climax. Instead these titular heads are only shown briefly and usually on a nearly obscured monitor. (Which can’t have pleased the studio that paid for major confrontation scenes between the Smiths and their bosses only to have those scenes tossed, recast, re-shot and then tossed again.)
Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s journey from script to screen is a tortured one. While Brad Pitt was always attached to the project and maintained some vague producers role, actors opposite him came and went -- the most notable being Nicole Kidman. Given the amount of physical action in the finished film, this is probably a good thing; while she can add a fake nose for a performance the kicking, shooting, and fighting most likely would have shattered our favorite porcelain doll of an actress like Meryl Streep at the end of Death Becomes Her.
Directors came and went, too. John Woo was attached for a while and with the finished film’s swirling camera moves and orchestrated mayhem, one can see where it would have been a good fit. Instead we have Doug Liman who, depending on whom you’re listening to, is either an indecisive, spend-mad idiot or the best juggler of script, scenes and actors in contemporary cinema. Given that several scenes were shot with the Smit’s fighting their respective bosses only to have those scenes tossed out, recast, re-shot and then tossed out again one would believe the former opinion.But given that ANY film is an organized mayhem and Liman’s films have included Swingers, Go, The Bourne Identity and now this, maybe he IS a genius.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=12432&reviewer=348
originally posted: 06/29/05 13:09:31
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USA
10-Jun-2005 (PG-13)
DVD: 29-Nov-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
09-Jun-2005
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