Mr. And Mrs. Smith

Year: 2005

Grade: C-

Country: USA

Director: Liman

Review

perhaps i’m growing more cynical with age, or maybe hollywood blockbusters have outgrown their welcome with me, or maybe this just wasn’t that good a flick. doug liman (go, bourne identity, swingers) knows how to direct a picture, but he falls short on material here. the direction is mostly adequate, but the screenplay represents a major indictment of hollywood cinema today – it’s a formulaic star vehicle.

what makes it worse is that there’s a degree of potential in the screenplay. there’s a subtext here that parallels that of american beauty, the graduate, and many more before it. a couple for whom the spark is lost, life is simply inertia, yet they are more similar than they know; deceit and a lack of communication have facilitated all this. if the characters were more roundly drawn it had a degree of potential to be a fun flick with an undercurrent of social commentary. instead we get a film that is (barely) buttressed by long, unbelievable action sequences and some successful comic relief.

this film is below the talent of liman and pitt and i’ve never thought that what’s her face was very good as an action actor, even though she was in both tomb raider movies.

i watched this film at one of the cooler theaters i’ve ever been in – the alamo, just outside of austin texas.

Watched in theater