June 10, 2005

Mr. & Mrs. Smith has its charms... but they could all fit on one bracelet.

This is hardly the worst film of all time, the year or even the last month. However, it still may turn into this year's Gigli in every way except for at the box office. There is little doubt that this film will open to more at the box office than Gigli managed over its full run... perhaps eclipsing that number of opening day.

But the Gigli analogy fits because here again we have two interesting actors who have become more famous than reputable, a lot of audience awareness, a director with significant proven gifts and a bottomless cup of self indulgence, and in the end, a movie that has its moments, but which simply does not work.

For Doug Liman, it is a kind of polar opposite to The Bourne Identity, which went through a similarly tortured route to the screen, but with less famous actors and a lot less profile. The result was that Liman's insistences were correct and the movie launched a legitimate franchise that changed the tone of spy pictures in this era. Liman's demands on that film all seem to have been about less flash and more substance. He wanted real, so he "had" to shoot on certain locations... he "had" to limit the bang bang... he "had" to allow slow passages to play out. And huzzah for him.

After seeing Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I have no idea what he "had" to have or why. All I know is that somewhere, sometime the machinery went right off the tracks in every department but lighting and costumes. Effects are cheesy, production design is often overdone, continuity... ha ha ha. I can only hope the catering was good.

If ever a movie called for a release of all its footage so the public could try to assemble a watchable entertainment, this is it. I really have no idea how many miles of smart ideas - which were probably too disconnected to use as they tried to cut the film into sanity - are on the cutting room floor. The late addition (and I mean late as in the third or fourth set of extra shooting days) of Keith David and Angela Bassett to the cast as the bosses of Mr. & Mrs. Smith manifests itself only in a blurry image of K.D. in one scene with Ms. Jolie. Perhaps is it Ms. Bassett's voice talking to Mr. Pitt in another scene. Clearly, with the hire of two black actors - albeit actors of the highest order - to play the bosses of competing killers, the joke was going to somehow be that they, too, were once a couple. Did they survive the kind of situation Mr. & Mrs. Smith were up against in the film or was this the explanation about why they were so anxious to slaughter their opposite number? I don't know. But the idea, which would have been about as close to clever as they might have gotten in the third act, is now gone. Perhaps the late addition of Vince Vaughn marked their doom, though he clearly works for someone too.

And don't get me started on that character... rich with possibilities as more than the occasional charm gag, but never more than that here.

There are vestiges of interesting ideas all over this thing. Was it once a battle of the sexes from the individuals to the organizations? Ms. Jolie's team seems intentionally estrogen heavy. But that goes nowhere.

Team Jolie is located in what seems to be a Brill Building like building in the middle of whatever city the film turned out to be in. Does blowing up one of the top floors of a building in a major metropolitan city simply remain nothing more than a personal vendetta turned Bond-esque escape gag?

The device of the couple in relationship counseling... it's promising. But it seems to be yet another framing device that gets abandoned for large chunks of the movie. The idea smartly captures the banality of the relationship, highlighting the central idea by juxtaposing it against the action. And it seems like a natural trick - though obviously ham-fisted, it can't be any more so than what is there now - to create an episodic feel to the parade of explosive scenes.

What is so desperately missing is the thing that Liman seemed like the perfect guy to bring to the film... the slower, personal moments. Looking at the big picture of the film, it is a couple that got together in a combination of sexual heat and convenience, slowly lost interest in anything but the convenience because they each were failing to communicate honestly, and take this stressful-to-anyone-but-professional-killers moment to discover that they have a lot more in common than they ever realized, thus rekindling the heat and establishing a truly loving relationship. Take away the eight-figure actors and the explosions and this could have been an art film. Geez... it could have been a wonderful Off-Broadway chat fest.

And somewhere, it got terribly, terribly lost.

There is an analogy to Charlie's Angels here. Liman farts better direction in his sleep than McG does wide awake, so it is somewhat unfair. But McG shot former Liman collaborator John August's script into a confused mess that was only released after going through repeated editing restructurings. McG smartly - though horridly - made sure that this would not be a problem on the sequel by making sure that every scene was so irrelevant to any other and that the whole blur was so incoherent that you could put it in any order and find it equally "entertaining." The punchline is that Sony's savior cutters did a better job with that mess than Fox's did with this mess. Perhaps the reason is that Liman remained involved and even his craziest, least coherent ideas made more sense than McG's. But Mr. & Mrs. Smith really needed to have a new cutter in an edit bay who hadn't even read the script and had full carte blanche to try to find a way out.

The whole thing is frustrating because the idea is so strong and the actors are movie-star compelling and they clearly did spend the money and Liman is very talented and at the very least this should have been fun. But by somewhere in the middle act, the audience has checked out after being fed the full meal the movie has to offer and the film really never demands that we reinvest ourselves.

I am of two minds about just how bad this film is, because part of me says that it is worse than The Day After Tomorrow, since that film, utterly moronic and blisteringly bad as it was, was at least consistent in its efforts. On the other hand, there is more charm and intelligence and less cynicism here... the intentions are more honorable. But I guess that makes the failure even greater. And in an odd way, even greater than Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. So maybe it is the worst film of the year or the summer or the month. I guess that my bottom line is just a lot more accepting of an absolute failure with good intentions than of a painfully wrong idea that succeeds in its goals, even if it makes the planet a less attractive place to live by its mere existence.

But that's just me...

E-ME.