Domestic disturbance

Review by Vives Anunciacion

Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Directed by Doug Liman
Written by Simon Kinberg
Starring Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Vince Vaughn
PG 13/ 115 minutes
Twentieth Century Fox

Pity there isn’t a marriage between Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston anymore. As I have imagined several times, I wonder how it would have been to have dinner with the Pitts. Now it’s my belief the Brangelina thing is only a publicity stunt, and the rumors should stop where this movie begins. Really. Quit the chismis.

So what does a couple do when their marriage is falling apart? The best way is to get counseling. That’s what John and Jane Smith do when they realize their bogus marriage is going to the pits. The Smiths are a shy, quiet couple living supposedly normal suburban lives, except that both happen to secretly live very dangerous lives.

John and Jane are lethal assassins for hire, each working for a different organization. When each of them gets an assignment that reveals more than just a common target, Mr. and Mrs. Smith not only discover that the their marriage is a decoy, it’s also a professional hazard. They’ve successfully hidden their true identities from each other so much that they don’t know they’re both lethal weapons. The only way out of the marriage, at first, is to kill the competition, meaning each other. Suddenly, killing the spouse is a conjugal duty. Mr. and Mrs. Smith must turn to Smith-and-Wesson (that’s a brand of gun, so you know.)

Director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, The O.C.) takes a comedic shot at marital conflicts and pushes it further by making a movie that combines the War of the Roses and True Lies. The planet’s most beautiful persons (as far as magazines would tell) Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play the killer couple who give new meaning to the term domestic violence.

The entire movie is a hectic schedule of one action sequence to another in a way that expresses the ordeals that the couple has to go through in order to resolve their marital (and professional) differences. Pitt and Jolie share great chemistry together onscreen (no wonder the rumors), literally exploding into fireworks and pyrotechnics throughout the action-packed movie. They also share snappy witticisms thanks to a script that has been written and re-written several times to ensure a lively debate between the warring couple.

One good scene is a True Lies-type of tango where the couple confronts each other after finding out their true identities while at the same time executes a well-choreographed dance. But that scene puts Mr. and Mrs. Smith in a nutshell: the whole movie is foreplay for fetishistic coupling. Halfway through the movie, John and Jane are killing each other in their home only to end up where they truly belong – the sack. The fun and the comedy only mask what actually is a movie so full of guns and bullets they put Bad Boys to shame. Like the Poison song that John listens to in the desert scene, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is nothin’ but a good time.

Should marriage counseling fail, the next best option is the American standard for conflict resolution – brute force. At the slightest indication of disagreement, shoot each other. Ahh, I had the same feeling for this movie. At the slightest sign of discomfort, shoot the movie. Thankfully, I needn’t bother looking for the bazooka. Violence, thy virtue is beauty.