Mr. & Mrs. Smith - PG-13
Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that this film features repeated and sustained violent scenes, involving guns, explosions, and knives. It's also worth noting that these scenes most often set husband against wife. Following one of these extended shoot-outs, they engage in mostly off-screen sex (some close-ups of limbs and lips serve as prelude). Husband and wife lie to each other, appear in therapy sessions, discuss their lack of intimacy. Jane wears dominatrix gear and wields a crop, just before she snaps her target's neck. John pees in the desert (back to camera). Characters smoke, drink, drive fast, crash, and deploy major weapons.
Families might discuss the extreme (and darkly comic) representation of workaholic partners and marital stress. How does the movie use a romantic comedy's basic structure (sparring couple, parallel confidantes, zany situations reframed as violence) in order to comment on the high-stress pace of contemporary, two-career marriages? How might John and Jane have avoided tensions by not deceiving one another to start with? What is exciting about keeping secrets? Why is it better to tell the truth?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Thinly plotted, over-actionated, and frankly preposterous, MR. AND MRS. SMITH is entertaining and even clever if you take it on its own terms. These would be: the premise is nonsense (married super-assassins have no idea of the other's occupation) and the resolution is absurd (they reconcile to fight their cutthroat employers). In between, you see the gorgeous John (Brad Pitt) and Jane (Angelina Jolie) wrestle, argue, leap, dash, and shoot big guns at each other.
For all its unadventurous action-spy movie tricks, the movie offers two surprises. First, Brad Pitt can dance. And not only in the sense that he turns a decent tango with Jolie in a flashback scene, but also, more enchantingly, in his performances with inanimate objects, a la Fred Astaire or even Buster Keaton. Boyishly energetic and utterly light on his feet, Pitt leaps through hedges, flies over furniture, juggles a teacup in one scene and a large weapon in another (efforts to ward off the clattering effects of initial clumsiness, as he's about to give away his position). In each case, he recalls the wicked speed and deftness of Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity (also directed by Doug Liman, and also focused on fractured identities, lost pasts, and distrustful personalities, though the latter is more clearly a spy movie, less hybrid).
Genre-mixing is the film's second good idea. Finding the thematic similarities between romantic comedies and action pictures -- love of chaos, desire for order -- it proceeds to smash them together repeatedly, so that both are deconstructed, reassembled, and more interesting for the wear and tear. Equally cocky and apprehensive, John and Jane pretend to be happily married (she buys dreadful draperies, he doesn't notice she's added peas to the dinner menu) even as they live separate lives (they hide their weapons stashes in gendered spaces, hers behind the oven, his in the basement). But they share a high-tech, low-affect appreciation for controlled mayhem, which makes them ideal mates after all, indicated when they join forces for a final shoot-out against their mutual enemies -- their heartless corporate employers.
Families who like this movie might also enjoy The Bourne Identity, True Lies (Arnold and Jamie Lee Curtis as husband and wife on a spy adventure), Adam's Rib (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as married lawyers), or Steamboat Bill, Jr., in which Buster Keaton survives catastrophes and shows off his dexterity with objects.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentSexual banter, dominatrix outfit, mild sex scene following violent exchange. |
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ViolenceLots of shooting and exploding, less brutal than antic. |
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LanguageBrief. |
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Social BehaviorCharacters lie, drive fast, shoot, and use knives: they are assassins, after all. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoDrinking and drunkenness during flashback courtship scenes. |
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