Faded Boxers

The biggest problem with Mr. & Mrs. Smith is that it fails to follow through with its moderately intriguing premise and cops out at the end.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie respectively. Duh) find out they’re on opposite sides of the fence and decide that the only way to resolve the issue is to kill each other. A small part of me hoped that the movie ends with at least one of them dying in the other’s arms. At least that would have taken balls on the part of the producers. I expected something as smart and as thought provoking as The War Of The Roses, but that wouldn’t have made a lot of money. We’re talking about Hollywood, where smart movies have no place. So while the movie starts off as The War Of The Roses, it ends as the dismal Undercover Blues.

The movie starts off interestingly enough. Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie may look like the perfect couple, but even perfect people run into snags now and again. Their marriage has gone stale, and the two act like strangers living under the same roof. If you’re looking for something that closely resembles human emotion, you’ll probably find it in the first half.

I say “closely resemble human emotion” because the film can’t even portray couples having trouble realistically. Yes they’re bored out of their minds, but they’re “Hollywood bored” not real life bored. Hollywood bored is brushing your teeth together and not talking. Real life bored means politely saying yes to everything your nagging wife says while secretly plotting her death.

Come to think of it, the chosen careers of both Smiths could have been used as a metaphor for the hostility that develops between married couple everywhere. But that would have been too cerebral for the target market so fuck that.

When they do find out about each other’s the secret lives, the film degenerates into an ejaculation of action sequences held together by sound bytes instead of actual dialogue. Ok, it’s not as bad as it sounds because some of those action scenes were quite well designed (albeit poorly photographed); and some of the bickering between the two leads contained wit. A favorite scene of mine involves a double-entendre about the number of people they’ve both killed / slept with.

In the end (let’s face it, I’m not spoiling anything) neither one of them dies because the two leads are probably the two most good looking people to grace the screen, and killing off either one of them would result in a lot of disappointed people leaving the theater.

Of course it’s going to make a lot of money, and everyone will start raving about it especially when it hits theaters in the US on June 10. It’s inevitable, because the film is exactly what everybody wants, but not exactly what everybody needs.