Sky K Studios Movie Blog

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Grosse Point Blank is certainly a better action comedy about the internal lives of hitmen. And there's no question that Mr. and Mrs. Smith does not see Doug Liman as on top of his game as he was with Go, a hip yet tender riposte to Pulp Fiction, and The Bourne Identity, which matched Matt Damon's deep and twisted masculinity with top-notch genre filmmaking. (I dug Swingers, too.) The movie makes fun with summer explosions and two affable stars, but where it really deserves recognition is in the film canon of suburban angst and repression.

Kevin Spacey's adolescent regression in American Beauty came at the expense of wife Annette Bening, who had to become shrill and castrating to put his suffering in relief. The inevitable violent denoument was something of a Rube Goldberg return-of-the-repressed; Spacey was killed by Chris Cooper's psycho-homophobe-soldier-dad, who thought he saw his son giving Spacey head in the neighbor's garage when he was only bending down to pick something up near Spacey's reclining figure! Goll, he musta felt dumb.

Pitt and Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith also live in the kind of anesthesia-mansion that usually denotes a set decorator's lame fealty to Pottery Barn, or the dread airless suburban anomie. (The lived-in, junky bungalow in which fellow assassin Vince Vaughn lives demontrates that there is method to the blandness.) Because the Smiths are well-paid assassins of never-clear targets, the house also holds munitions sufficient to arm the Tamil Tigers. While the movie makes good fun out of resolving the couple's sexual deficiencies with violent, ballistic abandon, the real fun is when they take it out on the goddamn house. Brad and Angelina survive endless rounds of small- and large-arms fire. Their tasteful furnishings do not. (Although the Subzero fridge prove bulletproof.)

If there were any question that the movie's key target is the BoBo and his commodity fetish, the final action sequence clears that up. The Smiths hole up in a store that seems to be a Crate-and-Barrel warehouse concept. Cornered in a garden shed, they emerge like Butch and Sundance to survive double the fusillade that killed those two in Bolivia. The store, like their house, takes the hit.

posted by Josh K-sky at 11:48 AM