Marriage contract

The few married people I know tell me there are times they just want to strangle each other. In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play a husband and wife actually contracted to carry out each other’s murder.

Directed by Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity), the film has wicked fun with the institution of marriage while delivering high-octane thrills courtesy of its superstar leads. Jolie and Pitt have genuine chemistry, a fact sure to further fan the fires in the gossip columns.

The pair play Jane and John Smith, a bored married couple who have entered counseling to keep things from getting worse. Although most, if not all, married couples keep secrets from each other, Mr. and Mrs. Smith have everyone else beat by a country mile. As it turns out, both are ace contract killers for competing organizations. She thinks he’s a successful building contractor, and he thinks she’s a successful computer consultant. When Jane and John botch a hit to which they both are assigned, not only are their covers blown, but each must eradicate the other just to save face. Some might say that beats a messy divorce.

The film is similar in both plot and tone to James Cameron’s enjoyable True Lies (1994), in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a government spy who keeps his profession from his wife. Although the earlier was heavier on the action, both films have the same killer combination of tongue-in-cheek humor and roller-coaster thrills.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith is essentially a one-joke movie, but what a joke it is: Secrets can, quite literally, kill a marriage. Liman instills the film with countless visual and verbal jokes to this effect. One of the movie’s funnier sight gags involves Mr. Smith keeping his secret cache of weapons and money in the tool shed and Mrs. Smith keeping hers in a secret compartment beneath the stove. As the action gets heated and both go after each other with a vengeance, you don’t have to be Dr. Ruth to think, "Hey, maybe all this marriage needed was a little excitement."

The movie starts to run out of steam by about the two-thirds mark by no fault of either star. Jolie seems to have a natural gift for looking gorgeous and vicious at the same time, and Pitt has always been good at showing the dark side beneath his farmboy/male-model exterior.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith could have had some more fun with its premise and is a little heavy on the action, but all in all is a delightful diversion for those who just want to have fun at the movies.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith
PG-13
Starting today at area theaters
Three reels out of four

Recommended Rental

Heaven Can Wait
Not rated
Available Tuesday

The 1943 film is not related to the 1978 Warren Beatty movie (which is actually a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan). But it is a true delight for fans of director Ernst Lubitsch or actor Don Ameche. The romantic comedy (made when that term actually meant something) tells the story of upper-class ne’er-do-well Henry Van Cleve (Ameche). When Henry dies, he heads for He-double-hockey-sticks, where he assumes he will spend eternity. While down there, he tells the devil (played with panache to spare by Laird Cregar) his life story, all told in flashbacks on the screen. Afterwards, the devil tells him "thanks but no thanks" and instructs the elevator operator to take Henry "upstairs." A true classic.