MR. & MRS. SMITH

REVIEWED BY CHARITY BISHOP

Our rating: 3 out of 5

Because of: sexual content, language, violence

Rated:

I have a healthy respect for marriage. I believe that it's a union ordained by God and should be conducted in an arrangement of mutual compatibility and selflessness. But I also have a slightly sarcastic sense of humor, and the minute I saw the trailers for Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I knew it was going to be the most fun I'd had in a movie theatre in months. I was right.

After "five or six years of marriage," the Smiths are facing issues. They never talk to one another anymore. Each one goes about their life, they meet at home for a fine cooked meal, then turn out the light and turn in. These differences have landed them at a counselor's office to help save their marriage. It all began with a whirlwind romance in the tropics. A high ranking official of the government had just been assassinated, and the local authorities were looking for people traveling alone. Both caught without an alibi, John (Brad Pitt) and Jane (Angelina Jolie) decided to play man and wife. Six weeks later, back in the United States, they're still together. Eventually this leads to a walk down the isle. Each partner complaints that there are communication issues, and the counselor believes they are keeping things from one another. He's not wrong. John isn't really a businessman downtown, he's an elite assassin, and his beautiful domestic housewife financier makes her money killing off enemies of wealthy clients.

Then both are given the same assignment, to target and destroy a man being transported cross-country by the FBI. Jane is there early in the morning, in a shack on the mountainside, and John shows up around noon in a dune buggy. After trading gunfire and rockets, both escape with their life... but it doesn't take either one long to find out that their dear hubby was behind the other end of the gun barrel. Attempting to reassure their coworkers that there's no love left in their relationship, it becomes a game of wits as Jane attempts to take her husband out of the game. They have forty-eight hours to solve the problem or face being hunted down and killed. What ensues is hilarity, a high body count, some fantastic one-liners, and a truly exhilarating thrill ride that will leave the audience breathless. Angelina and Brad have fantastic chemistry and the film just loves to linger on the sexual tension between them. It's also a fairly decent script.

Awesome gunfight sequences play second fiddle to the more humorous moments as they test one another -- a dropped bottle of wine, a subtle examination of who has the biggest knife at the dinner table, a tango on the dance floor. Then bombs go off, people get shot, cars flip off the highway, and we're back on the run again. There aren't a lot of moral lessons to be gleaned from a pair of assassins who decide to target one another, but eventually their relationship takes a turn for the better and they decide to be honest with one another. It also has a very positive outcome where marriage is concerned. Audiences looking for a mockery of wedded bliss will find this entertaining, while some may be offended. The film seems to justify violence due to the fact that both are trained assassins, but everyone will be uncomfortable with the sequence where John beats up on Jane with his fists and feet. They slam one another into walls, wrestle on the ground, land punches, and kick one another. There's an extremely high body count and some of it is played for comic relief. Houses explode. Grenades go off. Rockets tear through walls. Bullets fly in all directions, taking out sixty or more nameless, faceless agents. There's an ambiguous moment when the audience wonders if John has just run over someone.

One of the more violent fighting sequences between our "unhappily married couple" turns into sexualized foreplay, as they partially undress and make out in the hallway. That and an earlier sequence of passionate kissing (on their first night together as a couple) imply that they become intimate. Their counselor asks them twice how their sex life is. Innuendo is traded on occasion. In an early scene, Jane dresses up in black leather and totes a whip against a willing victim before snapping his neck. She wears only his button up shirt in a lengthy scene, walks around in her underclothes once, and shows a lot of thigh on several occasions. There's also some profanity, six abuses of Jesus' name and a muffled f-word. 

While I and most of the rest of the audience in the theatre enjoyed this tongue-in-cheek story about two assassins facing domestic differences, I am also a little concerned with the overall message the film was attempting to portray: that it may be okay to hit the woman in your life, provided that she's gunning for you first. That and that so many people were killed without thought (Jane and John both admit that after completing a job, they sleep easy) was a little disconcerting. If you have a morbid sense of humor, you will enjoy Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but if you're concerned with the concept of a man and woman pitted against one another toward a brutal end, you may not want to invite them home.