Mr. and Mrs. Smith, by Doug Liman (director)
A waste of a perfectly good premise
(Review posted 22 May 2006 18:13:29)

(Note that this note is actually about a film rather than a book, strictly speaking.)

This movie really had potential. Man and woman meet in an exotic location, get married, their marriage suffers from the secrets they're both keeping from each other, it turns out that the secrets are that they're spies / assassins for rival super-secret organizations, and when they discover this it completely changes the dynamics of their relationship as they have fun trying to kill each other and/or making violent love and/or fighting various bad guys and blowing things up, all against a background of Bond-like high tech and sophistication. It could have been funny and smart and sexy and all.

But oh, the grim reality.

There are a few (very few) smart and/or funny moments, mostly derived from mapping the usual marital tensions into the spy / assassin context ("Don't undermine me in front of the hostage" being the one that comes first to mind). There are a few (very few, considering) sexy moments, and they're remarkably unconvincing (if Pitt and Jolie were really falling in love, or even lust, during the filming, it must all have been happening off camera).

And there are many (endlessly many) utterly uninteresting gun battles, culminating in our heros (who, despite having fled the smoking ruins of their home in only their underwear just a scene or two ago, are both wearing apparently impregnible body armor) slaughtering an entire platoon of their former colleagues (who have not only all been to the Imperial Stormtrooper School of Dullshooting, but are also all wearing -12 Cursed Paper Maché Robes of Bullet Attraction). The absurdity of that ending permeates the entire film; if there was a contiguous two-minute stretch that actually made any kind of sense, I missed it.

And speaking of the ending, wtf? I mean, both of the powerful secret organizations that they work for want them dead, they defeat a platoon of guys sent to kill them, and then the credits roll. How is that an ending? Is the idea that the sequel can start with them standing amid the rubble and the bodies, and suddenly smacking themselves in the foreheads and saying "uh-oh, both of our secret organizations still want us dead; better get some more ammo!"? How about, say, a cleverly-arranged confrontation with the heads of their organizations, some suspenseful negotiations, some clever tricks, some sort of actual, like, ending?

So I'm sad because now no actual good movie with this premise can be made for some period of time. On the other hand there are lots of other good premises out there waiting, so we'll be okay. My advice is to find one of those, and skip this one.