Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Director: Doug Liman)

Liman directed three highly enjoyable flicks in Swingers, Go, and The Bourne Identity. He also did a movie called Getting In that I have not seen. This is Simon Kinberg's 2nd script of the year, after XXX: State of the Union.

OK, so Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie made some headlines during this film, and well, whoever decided these two should be in the same film together was obviously trying to break up Pitt's marriage to Jennifer Aniston, because putting two of the most gorgeous faces and bodies together on a set where physical contact is so pervasive is like flying the Millennium Falcon close to the Death Star.

This is True Lies meets The War of the Roses meets "Spy vs. Spy" and maybe even Grosse Pointe Blank, as married assassins Jane Smith (filthy-hot Jolie) and John Smith (filthy-hot Pitt) try to live normal, boring married lives, completely unaware that the other is an assassin. Then, they try to kill the same guy (Adam Brody, who is always there with an inside-joke when you need one, an inside joke that steals the movie), and their organizations command them to kill each other, with sexy results!

This movie takes a good, long time to start cooking, and then, it really sort of flies south after that. I've read numerous times about this film about how the tone was impossible to capture. Should it be comedy? Should it be action? Maybe a dark comedy? Well, the jokes are so bland as to not really be jokes. Every "observation" that the movie has is something like, "Oooh...Peas."

Other players, besides the obvious and Brody...we have Vince Vaughn, reteaming with Liman here, playing an assassin himself. It's Trent from Swingers gone bad. Cameos come in from director Chris Weitz (American Pie, About A Boy, In Good Company) and Jennifer Morrison from "House," because Fox has to advertise their TV shows on everything. And well, I'm sure all of them are highly confused why they are here. The worst assassins in the world try to kill the Smiths. None of them can aim worth a damn. This is to be expected, but we're supposed to be talking about world-precision killers here. They couldn't kill me in the middle of a desert with a bazooka and a fuel tanker parked beside me. The whole movie is all so we can see pretty faces, and in the end, it's just a movie about a failing marriage given some spark after both parties realize what psychos they both are.

A major disappointment from the usually reliable Liman, who does make this fun for a little while but obviously had no chance with the screenplay.