Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Starring: Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt
Director: Doug Liman (the guy who directed The Bourne Identity)

There’s actually very little reason not to see this one. Plot’s dead simple: two assassins marry, and they get hired to take each other out. Angelina and Brad look good together, there’s chemistry and there’s lotsa action to be had.

It’s a story of a loveless marriage taken to comic book extremes. The dialogue’s pretty nice (that opening sequence where they’re at the marriage counselor is hilarious) and Brad’s as close as you can get to Hugh Grant funny without actually being well, Hugh Grant. It hadn’t hit me before, but Jolie’s actually the only bankable female action hero in a very long time. I mean, Sigourney Weaver was bad ass as Ripley, and Linda Hamilton looked like she could fuck up you up some but they weren’t really action heroes. They weren’t cool.

And there’s enough cool to go around. You got your 007-like gadgetry, your Alias-like ops teams who help you set everything up and so you can just fly somewhere with your shampoo-perfect hair and shoot people with a laser-sighted rifle. So yeah, it’s not revolutionary, but it’s fun. There’s a nice freeway chase, bullets, car crashes all while Brad and Angelina start fessing up about the lies they’ve told each other (“I was married once,” says Brad before the Mrs bitch slaps him).

I liked it.

Let me just say that that scene where some bad guy’s getting his fetishistic ass whipped by a riding crop? The man’s not acting. I’m sure of this.