Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Mr. & Mrs. Smith is in the same league as After the Sunset. Its story is thin and incredulous and its action sequences are standard. But the movie chugs along powered simply by its attractive leads and the chemistry between them.

John(Brad Pitt) and Jane Smith(Angelina Jolie) are the Smiths - a couple whose marriage has lost its spark after 5(or 6) years. Though he's a contractor and she's a consultant on the surface, the two are in fact professional assassins working for different agencies. Their secret lives come to light when both of them are assigned the same target to take out.

The film works more as a comedy than as a romance or an action flick. Pitt and Jolie trade some delicious lines between them and the script has a number of zingers that make us chuckle. While most of these take off on the state of their marriage, there are some general one-liners that would've made directors like Quentin Tarantino proud(my favorite: "Happy endings are just stories that haven't finished!"). But whenever the two start uttering romantic lines(which thankfully isn't all that much), it sounds fake. And the action sequences are uninteresting and only the funny moments interleaved with them help relieve the tedium.

The film is guilty of unnecessarily raising our expectations and not meeting them. The way some of the initial scenes have been mounted(like the secrecy around the agency's boss) led me to look forward to some nice twists or plot developments later on. But nothing of that sort happens and the movie is content to concentrate on its leads. The ending too is sudden and there's no sense of closure.

But Pitt and Jolie have the charisma, screen presence and chemistry needed to carry such a thin story. Place any two other actors in these roles and the movie would've been a damp squib. I've always thought Pitt has great comedy timing and that comes in handy here. His deadpan expression as he utters some of his lines is great. Jolie is pretty much Tomb Raider without the costume. She has the best last lines and has an edge over Pitt in most scenes. Vince Vaugn is the only other actor with significant screen time as he plays kind of the comic sidekick for Pitt.