Meet John Smith (Brad Pitt), a good-looking cardigan-wearing guy in his early forties working as a construction contractor. Meet Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie), John’s wife slightly younger than her husband but equally good-looking working as a Wall Street computer tech. John and Jane’s marriage has unfortunately come to a dead-end. They are seeing a marriage counselor because apparently the gap that has grown between them keeps filling up with everything they don’t say to each other. As the audience will soon learn, appearances can be deceiving especially in the case of the Smiths. They are the world’s deadliest assassins working for competing agencies, their identities a secret even from each other. When the assassination of Benjamin Diaz (The O.C.‘s Adam Brody) goes wrong because both John and Jane were hired to do the kill, they grow increasingly suspicious of each other. What follows are uproarious verbal and ballistic shootouts between husband and wife, tire-screeching car chases and a tango dance scene all executed in near perfection.
If you hate Hollywood’s big-budget summer extravaganzas Mr. and Mrs. Smith will obviously bring you no satisfaction. Drenched in Tinseltown-glitz and deteriorating in the last half hour or so into nearly non-stop over-the-top action Smiths may not be everybody’s cup of tea. However, let’s put it that way and say that you are hard-pressed to find a more entertaining and flat-out-funny action comedy this year around. Both, Mr. Pitt and Mrs. Jolie are perfect in their roles and leave no opportunity to make fun of themselves. Director Doug Liman takes the wit from Swingers and mixes it with the action of The Bourne Identity and serves us a highly explosive cocktail that should not be missed. While the sexual innuendos are toned down (this is PG-13 after all) and the action sequences (of which there are a lot) deliver quite some thrills, it is above all the sarcastic bantering between John and Jane and their marriage counseling sessions that rank among the film’s best. Just imagine what kind of publicity this movie would get if Brad and Angie were a real-life couple too, oh wait.
Love gets lethal. Hilariously amoral grown-up fun. (3.5 out of 4 ugly divorces)