Genre Action

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)

Item: Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Rating: 3.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★★½ — Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)

There's a scene in Mr. & Mrs. Smith where a husband and wife are trying to kill each other with kitchen utensils, and it's one of the most weirdly romantic things I've seen in a 2000s blockbuster. Pots, pans, knives, a dishwasher door used as a shield. It's brutal and funny and oddly tender all at once, and it tells you everything you need to know about whether this film is worth your time. It absolutely is.

The premise is gloriously daft. Married couple, years of domestic routine, barely speaking at the dinner table. Turns out they're both professional assassins, and they've each been hired to kill the other. Hollywood fantasy of the highest order, yes. But Doug Liman, who clearly understood the assignment, plays it with just enough grounded tension to stop it tipping into parody. This could so easily have been cartoonish nonsense. Instead it's something sharper: a genuinely funny, genuinely exciting action-comedy that uses its central gimmick as a lens on how much goes unsaid in a marriage.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are, simply put, electric together. Whatever was happening off-screen during production, it's all up there on the screen, and you can't manufacture that kind of heat. Their performances are playful and sharp, but they never wink too hard at the audience. There's a lightness to how Pitt carries himself, all casual charm with a loaded weapon behind his back, and Jolie matches him beat for beat with this cool, coiled precision. They sell the absurdity because they're just serious enough about it. That balance is harder to pull off than it looks.

The action sequences are where the film really earns its reputation. The kitchen fight is the obvious highlight, and rightly so. There's an intimacy to it, the choreography using the domestic space brilliantly, every thrown pan feeling like a repressed argument finally getting its airing. But the car chase through the suburbs is brilliant too: fast, chaotic, and refreshingly light on the kind of CGI bloat that was already starting to plague action films at that point. Liman keeps it physical, keeps it grounded, and the result is spectacle that actually serves the story. Every explosion does feel like a metaphor for a marriage detonating. It's dumb and clever at the same time, and I mean both of those as compliments.

That said, I won't pretend it's flawless. The third act loses some of its momentum as the plot mechanics take over from the character dynamics. The satire of marriage as a kind of low-grade warfare gets stretched a little thin by the time the credits roll, and there's a sense that the script runs out of ideas right when it needs a final gear to shift into. The early scenes, with their couples therapy framing device and the brittle politeness of two people coexisting rather than living, are more interesting than the extended shootout that closes things out. A bit more wit in the finale and this could have been something genuinely special.

But I don't want to be too hard on it. As a high-concept popcorn film, it delivers the goods with style and confidence. I think about how badly this could have gone, and I'm grateful for what it is. If you want to see Pitt at his most effortlessly charming, or Jolie at her most lethally watchable, this is your film. And if you're after another Pitt film from around the same era that's actually sharper on the satire side of things, I thought Burn After Reading (2008) was a more fully realised skewering of American self-delusion, though it's a very different beast in tone.

Three and a half stars.

Smartly dumb, beautifully shot, and way more fun than it has any right to be. Not a classic. But as a defining slice of 2000s action-romance, explosions doubling as marital counselling and all, there's nothing quite like it.

Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2005 | Watched: 2025-10-10

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