Starring: Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie
Director: Doug Liman
Rated: M15+
JOHN and Jane Smith meet in Colombia, fall in love and marry.
For the past six years of marriage Jane thinks John is an engineer who owns and runs a construction company. John thinks Jane is a corporate consultant in Manhattan. Both are wrong. Their jobs are fronts for their real work – contract killers for the highest bidder.
Their greatest weapon is their anonymity. When both of them are contracted to kill the same man, they discover the truth about each other.
Now their contracts are to kill the person who knows too much – each other.
This absurd set up means we are never meant to take Mr and Mrs Smith seriously.
But writer Simon Kinberg opens and closes the film with John and Jane at marriage counselling talking about the problems in their relationship. They hold a very bleak view of marriage, with good cause in their case.
Mr and Mrs Smith continues to trade on a worrying trend seen in so-called real-life TV – deception.
Almost all the set ups on Temptation Island, Joe Millionaire, The Bachelorette and so on, are about deceiving someone. And the TV audience is in on it from the start.
This same premise is true in this film. We know within minutes that these two are frauds on every level.
Furthermore, when John and Jane try to eliminate each other there are several scenes of very brutal domestic violence. I never find violence between spouses entertaining.
The glorification of organised crime, contract killing, and offensive portrayals of gender politics will also offend many viewers.
Why should we care about all this in a film as inconsequential as Mr and Mrs Smith?
Because the popularity of stars like Brad and Angelina mean that hoards of teenagers will line up to see this film. It reinforces values that they getting from TV that, these days, there is no one who is good for their word, or ever true to it.
Mr and Mrs Smith glorifies sex and violence and dresses up deception to look sexy and cool.
To add insult to injury we find out that the real John Smith is a graduate of Notre Dame University, America’s leading tertiary institution. So much for the formation he received there!
Director Doug Liman made The Bourne Identity. He knows how to put together a good action flick, but Mr and Mrs Smith is unrelentingly violent, and some people might get vertigo from the overuse of the hand-held camera, and the dramatic zooms as we fly through the air.
There is also something sad about watching Brad Pitt as Mr Smith talk about what keeps a marriage together and what tears it apart, when his real-life marriage ended shortly after his work on this film concluded.
In both cases it is a tragedy and provides poor role modelling for his impressionable fans.
