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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 U.J. Lessing
"Beat the little woman. Pummel your man. It’s good for your marriage!"
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Mr. & Mrs. Smith is an escapist comic-fantasy that poses the question, “Wouldn’t it be fun if your spouse and you could re-ignite the passion in your marriage by beating each other mercilessly with intent to kill?” If this is an American fantasy (as 20th Century Fox clearly believes it is), shouldn’t we, as a society, be a little less worried about gay unions affecting the sanctity of marriage and more concerned with what sick little monkeys we’ve all become?The film stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as John and Jane Smith, a bored couple who have been married for six years. They go to marriage counseling, but neither of them can escape the feeling that their marriage is stuck in a rut.
But that’s about to change. It seems that both Smiths work as master-assassins in rival firms and have managed to keep their secret identities from each other for six years. The lies are exposed when both of them show up for the same assassination and are forced to target each other to stay alive.
The seminal scene in Mr. & Mrs. Smith is an all-out brawl in their home. The audience I saw the film with got a huge charge watching Jolie and Pitt beat the crap out of each other. With every punch, slap, kick and stomp people giggled and hooted. Unsurprisingly, Jolie and Pitt’s characters get more and more turned on by their own sadism and masochism, and all this leads to a big romantic finish where the two passionately make love.
Why people find this is exciting or funny in a movie is beyond me. It’s certainly disturbing in real life. Imagine your neighbor, Bob, coming over to your house and saying, “You know, Linda and I were having real marital problems, until one day we both started wailing on each other. I kicked Linda in the sternum. She smashed me in the face with an iron skillet. After I tossed her to the ground and punched her multiple times, we made love. It was just what we needed, man.”
The film is not a total loss. Clearly Pitt and Jolie do work well with each other when they’re not engaged in physical combat. Opening scenes with their therapist, quiet battles over salt placement at the table, and discussions about “reading versus turning the lights out at bedtime” are particularly charming. These moments are fun because they nicely capture the nature of arguments between people who have lived together for quite some time.
Writer Simon Kinberg even attempts to throw in some subtle satire about how consumerism affects marriages. The couple has to literally destroy all of their material possessions to be happy, and the final battle takes place in a department store that’s a cross between Costco and Home Depot, the bastions of couplehood.Still, the whole thing feels like an exercise in amorality and stupidity. If violence is truly the only way to resurrect matrimonial bliss then perhaps we should seriously consider a constitutional amendment banning heterosexual marriage. It’s just too sick and perverted.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=12432&reviewer=396
originally posted: 06/11/05 02:12:56
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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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