Mr. & Mrs. Smith opens with a husband and wife in marriage counseling, describing the slow erosion of their five or six years together. John Smith is a construction executive. Jane Smith is an IT recruiter. They live in a large Colonial Revival house in the New York City suburbs and socialize, reluctantly, with their conventionally wealthy neighbors. Jane once installed drapes John said he disliked. That is the whole of their visible life.
It is a cover. Both are skilled field operatives for separate contract-killing firms, each among the best in the field, each hiding the work from the other. Doug Liman directed the film from a script by Simon Kinberg. It runs 120 minutes. The title tells you the joke and the premise at once, and the film never finds much more than that.
Trailer, via FilmTrailersChannel.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the Dinner Table
The casting is the reason this film still gets talked about. Pitt and Jolie play John and Jane, and the pairing carries the movie further than the screenplay can. The two are good at the quiet hostility of a marriage running on habit: the pauses, the small cruelties, the way neither one says the true thing. When the film asks them to shift into operatives trying to kill each other, they hold the same register, which is the right call. These are not people who scream. They are people who have been not-screaming for years.
The chemistry is the thing reviewers keep returning to, and it is real on screen. But chemistry between two movie stars is not a story. Once the secret is out, the film has nowhere to go but escalation, and escalation is not the same as drama. The marriage material is the strongest part of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The action is the part that gets the runtime.
Bogotá, Colombia, and the Whirlwind Courtship
The backstory arrives in pieces. John and Jane first met in Bogotá, Colombia, where they claimed to be together to avoid being questioned by Colombian authorities. The courtship was fast. They married. Neither told the other what they did for a living.
The premise contains its own ending. If two assassins married under cover stories, then the marriage may have been part of the cover, and the film is honest enough to raise that fear in both characters. John and Jane each start to suspect the other will kill them to keep the secret buried. That suspicion is the engine of the second half, and it is a better engine than the film deserves credit for.
The Botched Hit on Benjamin Danz
The turn comes when both are assigned to kill the same man: Benjamin “The Tank” Danz, a DIA prisoner, during a prison transfer. They run into each other on the job. The hit is botched. Each now knows what the other is.
What follows is a tense dinner, then Jane sneaking off and driving away from the house. John follows, hoping to talk. He slips against a fence and accidentally fires a gunshot that nearly hits her. That accident settles her fear for good. Jane works with her team and steals John’s armory from their home. She tries to kill him. He escapes, again and again, and the attempts on each other’s lives build until the conflict ends in a massive shootout.
The fence slip is the film’s best piece of plotting. It is stupid, it is accidental, and it is exactly how a marriage falls apart: not by decision but by a misstep that reads as intent. Nothing else in Mr. & Mrs. Smith is that sharp.
Vince Vaughn, Kerry Washington and the Supporting Cast
The supporting cast is thin but functional. Vince Vaughn plays Eddie. Adam Brody is Benjamin Danz. Kerry Washington is Jasmine, Keith David is Father, and Chris Weitz and Rachael Huntley play Martin and Suzy Coleman, the neighbors. Michelle Monaghan appears as Gwen.
Vaughn gets the film’s loosest material and does what he can with it. Washington is given almost nothing, which is a waste of a performer who can hold a scene. The neighbors exist to make a point about the Smiths’ performance of normal life, and the point lands once, early, then repeats.
The production history is more interesting than most of the middle. Producers had Pitt and Nicole Kidman set for the leads when Liman got the script. Kidman dropped out over scheduling conflicts with The Stepford Wives, and the film was left without a co-lead. Pitt then dropped out too. Aishwarya Rai was approached for Jane Smith and refused, uncomfortable with on-screen kissing. Liman considered Will Smith and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and also the pairing of Johnny Depp and Cate Blanchett. Gwen Stefani auditioned for Jane.
Once Jolie signed, Pitt came back and the pair was set. John Leguizamo was offered Eddie and turned it down because he would have been paid on scale, a decision he later said he regretted. Parker Posey auditioned for Jasmine; the role went to Washington. That is a lot of near-misses for a film that now reads as inevitable, and it explains something about the finished product: the leads were assembled late, and the movie is built around them rather than around a story that needed them.
The Real-Life Romance That Outlasted the Film
The film’s most durable legacy is not on the screen. Filming marked the beginning of Pitt and Jolie’s real-life romantic relationship, which led to marriage and children and lasted, in the public record, from 2005 to 2016. That fact has attached itself to Mr. & Mrs. Smith so firmly that it is now hard to separate the movie from it.
The film is about a marriage that is partly a performance. The actors began a relationship while making it. Audiences have been reading that coincidence back into the movie for two decades, and the movie does not quite support the weight. That is not the film’s fault, but it is the film’s reputation. Strip the romance away and what remains is a mid-budget action comedy with two movie stars, a good first act, a serviceable second, and a shootout that goes on longer than it needs to.
A 2024 Series and the Question of Legacy
In 2024, a television series of the same name, loosely inspired by the film, premiered on Amazon Prime Video. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine star as two strangers paired as spies and posing as a married couple. Producer Arnon Milchan is the only cast or crew member returning from the original.
The series is a useful test of what the film actually had. The premise — two spies pretending to be married — is strong enough to survive a reboot with new leads and no connection to the original cast. What the 2005 film supplied was not the premise. It supplied Pitt and Jolie, and the knowledge that they were falling in love while the cameras rolled. Remove that and you are left with a premise other people can pick up and use.
The Score: 6.7 of 10
Mr. & Mrs. Smith grossed $487.3 million worldwide and was the seventh highest-grossing film of 2005. It received mixed reviews, with praise for the performances and chemistry and criticism for the screenplay. That split is correct, and it is also the whole story of the film. The parts that work are the parts carried by the two leads. The parts that fail are the parts that needed writing.
The screenplay is the weak point. Kinberg’s script sets up a marriage worth caring about and then spends most of its second half on gunplay, as if the action were the payoff rather than the interruption. The film is 120 minutes, and a tighter cut would have kept the dinner scene, the fence slip and the armory theft, and lost a good deal of what sits between them.
What holds up is the domestic material. The drapes. The counseling. The neighbors the Smiths cannot stand. The idea that two people can live side by side for years and never say what they do all day. That is a real subject, and the film touches it before it reaches for the guns.
What does not hold up is the notion that the film is a great action comedy. It is a decent one with an excellent cast. The set pieces are loud and competent, and they are not memorable. The shootout at the end is the least interesting thing in the movie, which is a problem when the movie has been building toward it.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith earns its place in the conversation for reasons that have almost nothing to do with its craft. As a film, it is a good first hour and a long, noisy second one. The score is 6.7 of 10.
KEY FACTS
– Title: Mr. & Mrs. Smith
– Year: 2005
– Director: Doug Liman
– Writer: Simon Kinberg
– Runtime: 120 minutes
– Leads: Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie
– Release date: June 10, 2005
– Distributor: 20th Century Fox
– Worldwide gross: $487.3 million
– 2005 rank: seventh highest-grossing film
– 2024 series: Amazon Prime Video, starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine
– Score: 6.7 of 10
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