“Mr. & Mrs. Smith” (2005)
Rating: 
I really wanted to like this movie.
Like most American men I find Angelina Jolie to be someone very worth watching. And few actresses carry off that “dangerous to be around” mystique quite as convincingly. Brad Pitt is as under-rated an actor as Tom Cruise is over-rated. So right there this had promise. The love triangle scandal didn’t bug me, I work in Hollywood, shit happens – especially with the Rich and Famous.
So I settled in for a quiet Friday night to watch “Mr. & Mrs Smith.” What I wasn’t prepared for was how painfully dull things were at the outset. It wasn’t that it lacked authenticity. They acted very much like a married couple having problems and difficulty communicating. But there was no pace to it. And too many scenes were they were both in frame so you could barely pick up the subtleties of what they were trying to portray.
They did a nice job on the characters, though. One good scene towards the end they’re comparing how many people they’d killed. Pitt bashfully says “50 or 60″ and starts to go on about how he’s been through it all. Then Jolie cuts him off and says she’d killed 312 … “well, some of them were two at once.” Priceless.
They also retain consistency with the styles of the two assasins. In one scene they both have been assigned to kill the same target, unbeknownst to each other. Jolie gets there in advance, sets up electronic surveilance in the target area, and lays explosives so she can take out the target unseen from a safe distance. Pitt charges up in a dune buggy two minutes before the target is due to arrive and just saunters toward the target area carrying a rocket launcher. That contrast of careful planning versus instinct and reaction is repeated thoughout, and also is reflected in their marriage.
The stuntwork and special effects are as good as any Bond movie. Everything from throwing knives to rocket launchers gets used. Jolie looks stunning as usual and Pitt does a great job playing a guy in love with a woman who’s his equal, or even his better in many cases.
I have no idea what Vince Vaughn was doing in this movie. He always plays the same over-the-top quasi-psycho personality, and it’s boring after a dozen times.
The problem with this movie is twofold. One is the pace. It just doesn’t move. I don’t mean there wasn’t enough action, either. It felt like they had a dozen good scenes and then realized they needed another dozen to hook these together and make a two hour movie. So you start losing interest and then something happens, and then you start to wonder if you should go make popcorn, and then something happens. Given the cast and the concept, this should have been a movie where you didn’t want to leave the room.
The other problem is the director and/or writer spent more time on the friction between the characters than on their chemistry. The best parts of the movie are when Pitt and Jolie are allied and working as a team. Even their arguments during this part of the movie are great to watch because they have such great chemistry. But it takes an hour to get to this part.
It’s a pretty good movie, but it could have been so much better.
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