Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005 film)
Encyclopedia
Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a 2005 American romantic comedy
Romantic comedy film
Romantic comedy films are films with light-hearted, humorous plotlines, centered on romantic ideals such as that true love is able to surmount most obstacles. One dictionary definition is "a funny movie, play, or television program about a love story that ends happily"...

 action film
Action film
Action film is a film genre where one or more heroes is thrust into a series of challenges that require physical feats, extended fights and frenetic chases...

 directed by Doug Liman
Doug Liman
Douglas Eric "Doug" Liman is an American film director and producer best known for Swingers , The Bourne Identity , Mr. & Mrs. Smith , Jumper , and Fair Game .-Early life:...

 and written by Simon Kinberg
Simon Kinberg
Simon Kinberg is an English-born American screenwriter of American films.-Life and career:He was born in London, England. He is Jewish. His family moved later on to the United States. Kinberg attended Brentwood School in Los Angeles, California and graduated in 1991...

. The original music score was composed by John Powell
John Powell
John Powell is a British composer, best known for his scores to motion pictures. He has been based in the United States since 1997 and has composed the scores to over fifty feature films. He rose to fame in the late 1990s and 2000s, scoring numerous animated films, and collaborating with...

. The film stars Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie is an American actress. She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards, and was named Hollywood's highest-paid actress by Forbes in 2009 and 2011. Jolie is noted for promoting humanitarian causes as a Goodwill Ambassador for the...

 and Brad Pitt
Brad Pitt
William Bradley "Brad" Pitt is an American actor and film producer. Pitt has received two Academy Award nominations and four Golden Globe Award nominations, winning one...

 as a bored married couple who learn that they are both master assassins when they are sent on the same job.

Plot

The film opens with John (Brad Pitt
Brad Pitt
William Bradley "Brad" Pitt is an American actor and film producer. Pitt has received two Academy Award nominations and four Golden Globe Award nominations, winning one...

) and Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie is an American actress. She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards, and was named Hollywood's highest-paid actress by Forbes in 2009 and 2011. Jolie is noted for promoting humanitarian causes as a Goodwill Ambassador for the...

) answering questions during marriage counseling. The couple has been married for "five or six" years, but their marriage is suffering to the point that they cannot remember the last time they had sex
Sexual intercourse
Sexual intercourse, also known as copulation or coitus, commonly refers to the act in which a male's penis enters a female's vagina for the purposes of sexual pleasure or reproduction. The entities may be of opposite sexes, or they may be hermaphroditic, as is the case with snails...

. They tell the story of their first meeting in Bogotá
Bogotá
Bogotá, Distrito Capital , from 1991 to 2000 called Santa Fé de Bogotá, is the capital, and largest city, of Colombia. It is also designated by the national constitution as the capital of the department of Cundinamarca, even though the city of Bogotá now comprises an independent Capital district...

, Colombia, where they met while both were secretly on the run from Colombian authorities; since the authorities were looking for tourists travelling alone after a recent heist, the two claimed to be together to avoid being questioned. They quickly fell in love and were married. John later states,in the end that Jane "looked like Christmas morning" to him on the day they met.

In reality, John and Jane are both skilled assassins working for different firms, both among the best in their field. Each is concealing their true profession from their spouse. Under these cover stories, John and Jane balance their apparently mundane marriage – which both of them find after a few years to be growing dull and suffocating – with their secretive work. When both are assigned to kill prisoner Benjamin "The Tank" Danz (Adam Brody
Adam Brody
Adam Jared Brody is an American film and television actor and part time musician. He began his career in 1995, appearing on Gilmore Girls and other series, and subsequently came to fame for his role as Seth Cohen on The O.C. Brody later appeared in several film roles, including Mr. & Mrs...

) during a transfer, they encounter each other on the job and the hit ends up being botched. Believing each had been sent to stop the other from completing their mission, they seek to discover and eliminate the other.

After a few "mild" attempts on each other's lives, fueled by a mutual sense of betrayal, the marital spat culminates in a high-octane fight in the Smith house. After a long, evenly-matched fight, with their house shot to shambles, they wind up with guns in each other's faces. John balks, and lays his gun down; Jane finds she cannot shoot her spouse either, and both succumb to their love instead. Mr. and Mrs. Smith reunite and have sex.

The newly-rekindled Smith partnership is quickly threatened by their employers, who have now decided to eliminate the couple. John's best friend and coworker, Eddie (Vince Vaughn
Vince Vaughn
Vincent Anthony "Vince" Vaughn is an American film actor, screenwriter, producer and comedian. He began acting in the late 1980s, appearing in minor television roles before attaining wider recognition with the 1996 movie Swingers...

), turns down a bounty of $400,000 for each Smith (since he won't get out of bed for anything less than $500,000), but John and Jane find themselves under fire from an army of assassins. Fending off an attack which blows up their house, the Smiths steal their neighbor's minivan and successfully destroy three pursuing armored vans
Armored car (VIP)
A civilian armored car is a security vehicle which made by replacing the windows of a standard vehicle with bulletproof glass and inserting layers of armor plate into the body panels...

 of attackers, all while bickering over their fighting styles and newly-discovered personal secrets.

After meeting with Eddie, the Smiths decide to fight together to preserve their marriage. They kidnap Danz from his high-security prison in order to give their employers something they want more than the Smiths. Danz reveals that he was merely bait, hired jointly by their employers after it was discovered that the Smiths were married, in the hopes of having one Smith kill the other.

John and Jane forgo their separate contingency plans and make their stand together. In the final fight scene of the film, the Smiths – now working smoothly together as a team – defeat an extended attack by a large number of armed forces during a long shoot-out inside a department store
Department store
A department store is a retail establishment which satisfies a wide range of the consumer's personal and residential durable goods product needs; and at the same time offering the consumer a choice of multiple merchandise lines, at variable price points, in all product categories...

.

The film ends with the couple meeting the marriage counselor again, where the Smiths state how much their marriage has thrived and how happy they really are, with John motioning a subtle "10" when asked about the "sex question" once more.

An alternate ending is also available for the film. In it John and Jane escape to Italy and are in the marketplace when Jane begins to panic, seemingly losing track of a target in the area. After a brief search, the two locate their daughter, who proceeds to shoot, with a toy gun, a hanging doll with precise aim.

Cast

  • Brad Pitt
    Brad Pitt
    William Bradley "Brad" Pitt is an American actor and film producer. Pitt has received two Academy Award nominations and four Golden Globe Award nominations, winning one...

     as John Smith
  • Angelina Jolie
    Angelina Jolie
    Angelina Jolie is an American actress. She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards, and was named Hollywood's highest-paid actress by Forbes in 2009 and 2011. Jolie is noted for promoting humanitarian causes as a Goodwill Ambassador for the...

     as Jane Smith
  • Vince Vaughn
    Vince Vaughn
    Vincent Anthony "Vince" Vaughn is an American film actor, screenwriter, producer and comedian. He began acting in the late 1980s, appearing in minor television roles before attaining wider recognition with the 1996 movie Swingers...

     as Eddie
  • Kerry Washington
    Kerry Washington
    Kerry Washington is an American actress. She is known for her roles as Ray Charles's wife, Della Bea Robinson, in the film Ray , as Idi Amin's wife Kay in The Last King of Scotland, and as Alicia Masters, love interest of Ben Grimm, The Thing, in the live-action Fantastic Four films of 2005 and 2007...

     as Jasmine
  • Adam Brody
    Adam Brody
    Adam Jared Brody is an American film and television actor and part time musician. He began his career in 1995, appearing on Gilmore Girls and other series, and subsequently came to fame for his role as Seth Cohen on The O.C. Brody later appeared in several film roles, including Mr. & Mrs...

     as Benjamin "The Tank" Danz
  • Keith David
    Keith David
    Keith David Williams , better known as Keith David, is an American film, television, voice actor, and singer. He is perhaps most known for his live-action roles in such films as Crash, There's Something About Mary, Barbershop and Men at Work...

     as Father
  • Michelle Monaghan
    Michelle Monaghan
    Michelle Lynn Monaghan is an American actress known for her roles in Mission: Impossible III, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Gone Baby Gone, Made of Honor, The Heartbreak Kid, Eagle Eye, and Source Code.-Early life:...

     as Gwen
  • Angela Bassett
    Angela Bassett
    Angela Evelyn Bassett is an American actress. She has become well known for her biographical film roles portraying real life women in African American culture, including singer Tina Turner in the motion picture What's Love Got to Do with It, as well as Betty Shabazz in the films Malcolm X and...

     (uncredited) as Voice of Mr. Smith's boss
  • William Fichtner
    William Fichtner
    William Edward Fichtner is an American actor. He is best known for his roles as Sheriff Tom Underlay on Invasion, as Alexander Mahone on Prison Break, as William Sharp in Armageddon, and as Ken Rosenberg in the video games Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.- Early life...

     (uncredited) as Voice of Dr. Waxler – Marriage Counselor

Background

Screenwriter Simon Kinberg
Simon Kinberg
Simon Kinberg is an English-born American screenwriter of American films.-Life and career:He was born in London, England. He is Jewish. His family moved later on to the United States. Kinberg attended Brentwood School in Los Angeles, California and graduated in 1991...

 came up with the idea for the film after listening to a couple of his friends who were in therapy for their marriage. Kinberg noticed that the way they were describing it sounded "aggressive and mercenary" and he "thought it would make an interesting template for a relationship inside of an action film."

Music


Two soundtrack albums were released from the film: a film score composed by John Powell
John Powell
John Powell is a British composer, best known for his scores to motion pictures. He has been based in the United States since 1997 and has composed the scores to over fifty feature films. He rose to fame in the late 1990s and 2000s, scoring numerous animated films, and collaborating with...

, and a soundtrack with songs used in the film. The albums were released at different times to avoid confusion; the former was released on June 28, and the latter on June 7, 2005.

Score track listing
  1. Bogota
  2. The Bedroom
  3. Playing House
  4. Assignments
  5. His and Her Hits
  6. Office Work
  7. Desert Foxes
  8. John and Jane's Identity
  9. Dinner
  10. Hood Jump
  11. Mutual Thoughts
  12. John Drops In
  13. Tango De Los Asesinos
  14. Two Phone Calls
  15. Kiss And Make Up
  16. Minivan Chase
  17. Shopping Spree
  18. Dodging Bullets
  19. The Next Adventure

Soundtrack track listing
  1. "Love Stinks" – The J. Geils Band
  2. "Nothin' but a Good Time
    Nothin' but a Good Time
    "Nothin' But a Good Time" is the first single from the second Poison album Open Up and Say...Ahh!. The B-sides are "Livin' For the Minute" and "Look But You Can't Touch"....

    " – Poison
    Poison (band)
    Poison is an American glam metal band that achieved great success in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. To date, Poison has sold over 30 million records worldwide and have sold 15 million records in the United States alone. The band has also charted ten singles to the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100,...

  3. "Tainted Love
    Tainted Love
    "Tainted Love" is a song composed by Ed Cobb, formerly of The Four Preps, which was originally recorded by Gloria Jones in 1965. It attained worldwide fame after being covered by Soft Cell in 1981, reaching number one in the UK Singles Chart, and has since been covered by numerous groups and...

    " – Soft Cell
    Soft Cell
    Soft Cell are an English synthpop duo who came to prominence in the early 1980s. They consist of vocalist Marc Almond and instrumentalist David Ball. The duo is most widely known for their 1981 worldwide hit version of "Tainted Love" and platinum debut Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret...

  4. "Baby, Baby" – Alana D
  5. "Express Yourself" (Mocean Worker Remix) – Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band
    Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band
    Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band is a pioneering American soul and funk band. Formed in the early 1960s, they had the most visibility from 1967 to 1973 when the band had 9 singles reach Billboard's pop and/or rhythm and blues Hot 100 lists, such as "Do Your Thing" , "Till You Get...

  6. "Mondo Bongo" - Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros
  7. "Lay Lady Lay
    Lay Lady Lay
    "Lay Lady Lay" is a song written by Bob Dylan and originally released in 1969 on his Nashville Skyline album. Like many of the tracks on the album, Dylan sings the song in a low croon, rather than in the high nasal singing style associated with his earlier recordings...

    " – Magnet
    Magnet (musician)
    Magnet is the pseudonym of Norwegian singer-songwriter Even Johansen . To date, he has released four full-length studio albums as well as several singles and EPs. Johansen draws upon many influences, including folk, pop, and electronica...

     featuring Gemma Hayes
    Gemma Hayes
    Gemma Claire Hayes is an Irish singer-songwriter and member of The Cake Sale.-Early life:...

  8. "I Melt With You
    I Melt With You
    "I Melt with You" is a song by the British post-punk and New Wave band Modern English. The song, produced by Hugh Jones, was a single from the 1982 album After the Snow, and is about a couple making love as nuclear bombs fall. It reached #7 on Billboard's Top Tracks chart and #78 on the Billboard...

    " – Nouvelle Vague
    Nouvelle Vague (band)
    Nouvelle Vague is a French musical collective led by musicians Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux. Their name is a play on words, meaning "new wave" in French, and "bossa nova" in Portuguese...

  9. "Nobody Does It Better
    Nobody Does It Better
    "Nobody Does It Better" is a power ballad composed by Marvin Hamlisch with lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager. It was recorded by Carly Simon as the theme song for the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. It was the first Bond theme song to be titled differently from the name of the film, although...

    " – 8mm
    8mm (band)
    8mm is a trip-hop influenced pop-rock band from Los Angeles, California. 8mm was started by Sean Beavan , and his wife Juliette Beavan. The band currently consists of Sean Beavan, Juliette Beavan, and Jon Nicholson, Juliette being the frontwoman...

  10. "Let’s Never Stop Falling in Love" – Pink Martini
    Pink Martini
    Pink Martini is a 13-member "little orchestra" from Portland, Oregon, formed in 1994 by pianist Thomas M. Lauderdale. They draw inspiration from music from all over the world – crossing genres of classical, jazz and old-fashioned pop.-History:...

  11. "Tango De Los Asesinos (Assassin’s Tango)" – John Powell
    John Powell
    John Powell is a British composer, best known for his scores to motion pictures. He has been based in the United States since 1997 and has composed the scores to over fifty feature films. He rose to fame in the late 1990s and 2000s, scoring numerous animated films, and collaborating with...

  12. "Used to Love Her (But I Had To Kill Her)" - Voodoo Glow Skulls
    Voodoo Glow Skulls
    Voodoo Glow Skulls are an American ska punk band formed in 1988 in Riverside, California by brothers Frank, Eddie and Jorge Casillas and their longtime friend Jerry O'Neill...

  13. "You Are My Sunshine" – Stine J.
  14. "You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin" – The Righteous Brothers
    The Righteous Brothers
    The Righteous Brothers were the musical duo of Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield. They recorded from 1963 through 1975, and continued to perform until Hatfield's death in 2003...

  15. "Making Love Out of Nothing At All
    Making Love out of Nothing at All
    "Making Love Out of Nothing At All" is a power ballad written and composed by Jim Steinman and first released by Australian rock band Air Supply for their 1983 compilation album Greatest Hits. It reached #2 on the U.S...

    " - Air Supply
    Air Supply
    Air Supply is an Australian soft rock duo, consisting of Graham Russell as guitarist and singer-songwriter and Russell Hitchcock as lead vocalist. They had a succession of hits worldwide, including eight Top Ten hits in the United States, in the early 1980s...

  16. "You Give Love a Bad Name
    You Give Love a Bad Name (song)
    "You Give Love a Bad Name" is a song written by Jon Bon Jovi, Desmond Child, and Richie Sambora about a woman who has jilted her lover. Although originally written for the band Loverboy, the song was recorded by Bon Jovi...

    " – Atreyu
    Atreyu (band)
    Atreyu is an American rock band from Orange County, California, formed in 1998. The band consists of vocalist/lyricist Alex Varkatzas, guitarists Dan Jacobs and Travis Miguel, bassist Marc McKnight and drummer/vocalist Brandon Saller...

  17. "Love Will Keep Us Together
    Love Will Keep Us Together
    "Love Will Keep Us Together" is a popular song written by Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield in 1973. It was first released in the United Kingdom on Sedaka's 1973 LP The Tra-La Days Are Over, which was never released in the U.S. The song arrived in the U.S...

    " – Captain and Tennille

Reception

Mr. & Mrs. Smith received mixed reviews from critics. Review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

 gives the film a score of 58% based on 203 reviews, with an average score of 6/10. At the website Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...

, which assigns a normalized
Standard score
In statistics, a standard score indicates how many standard deviations an observation or datum is above or below the mean. It is a dimensionless quantity derived by subtracting the population mean from an individual raw score and then dividing the difference by the population standard deviation...

 rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received a rating average of 55, based on 41 reviews, which it ranks as "mixed or average reviews". Simon Braund in Empire gave the film a positive review, describing it as "A full-on action flick, subversive rom-com and weapons-grade star vehicle that's drenched in Tinseltown glitz, from a director who knows how to put the money on the screen while his tongue's firmly in his cheek". Daniel Saney on Digital Spy
Digital Spy
Digital Spy is a British entertainment and media news website. According to Alexa Internet traffic statistics, as of February 2011, Digital Spy is the 93rd most popular website in the United Kingdom, with an overall Alexa ranking of 2,088....

 gave the film four stars out of five, saying "Its ideas are often borrowed, and it’s hardly deep and meaningful, but it’s a fantastically fun film". Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...

 in the Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...

 praised the chemistry between the lead actors, saying "What makes the movie work is that Pitt and Jolie have fun together on the screen, and they're able to find a rhythm that allows them to be understated and amused even during the most alarming developments". In a negative review, Mick LaSalle
Mick LaSalle
Mick LaSalle is an American Mick LaSalle is an [[United States|American]] Mick LaSalle is an [[United States|American]] [[film reviewer] and the author of two books on pre-[[Motion Picture Production Code|Hays Code]] Hollywood...

 in the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...

 described the film as "awful" and went on to state: "The tiny smidgen of cleverness on display here is contained entirely in the premise. The follow-through is nonexistent".

Home media

A two-disc unrated version of the film was released on DVD on June 6, 2006. On the original DVD version during a commentary with the director, he mentions that he was not able to use as much sex and violence as they had originally filmed to meet the PG-13 rating.

Adaptations

In 2007, a pilot for a spin-off television series was made for the ABC
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

 network. Set six months after the end of the film, it was written by Simon Kinberg
Simon Kinberg
Simon Kinberg is an English-born American screenwriter of American films.-Life and career:He was born in London, England. He is Jewish. His family moved later on to the United States. Kinberg attended Brentwood School in Los Angeles, California and graduated in 1991...

 and directed by Doug Liman
Doug Liman
Douglas Eric "Doug" Liman is an American film director and producer best known for Swingers , The Bourne Identity , Mr. & Mrs. Smith , Jumper , and Fair Game .-Early life:...

. Kinberg described the proposed TV series as "Married... with Children
Married... with Children
Married... with Children is an American surrealistic sitcom that aired for 11 seasons that featured a dysfunctional family living in Chicago, Illinois. The show, notable for being the first prime time television series to air on Fox, ran from April 5, 1987, to June 9, 1997. The series was created...

 with guns." The roles of John and Jane were played by Martin Henderson
Martin Henderson
Martin Henderson is a New Zealand actor, well known to American audiences for his starring role in the ABC TV series Off the Map, while remaining known in his home country for his teenage role as Stuart Neilson in the soap opera Shortland Street.-Life and career:Henderson was born in Auckland, New...

 and Jordana Brewster
Jordana Brewster
Jordana Brewster is an American actress. She began her acting career in her late teens, with a 1995 one-episode role in the soap opera All My Children. She followed that appearance with the recurring role as Nikki Munson in As the World Turns, for which Brewster was nominated for Outstanding Teen...

. On website The Futon Critic, Brian Ford Sullivan criticised the chemistry between Henderson and Brewster and ended his review stating: "While there's always a few gems that get locked away in the networks' vaults each year, this decidedly isn't one of them". ABC decided not to commission the series.

In June 2010, Angelina Jolie revealed that she and Brad Pitt had inquired about a sequel to the film but were dissatified with the story. Jolie stated:"We did ask somebody to look into Mr. & Mrs. to see if they could crack a sequel, but there wasn’t anything original. It was just, Well, they’re going to get married, or they’ve got kids, or they get separated. Never great.”.

In February 2010, it was reported that Regency Enterprises was developing a prequel to the film which would be titled Mr. and Mrs. Jones and would not feature either Pitt or Jolie. The story would follow a pair of spies who pose as a married couple when they graduate agency training. Akiva Goldsman is attached to produce.

In July it was announced that Hong Kong studio New Asia Entertainment Group would be producing a remake entitled Assassin Couple. The film will star Donnie Yen
Donnie Yen
Donnie Yen is a Hong Kong actor, martial artist, film director and producer, action choreographer, and world wushu tournament medalist...

 and Cecilia Cheung
Cecilia Cheung
Cecilia Cheung Pak-Chi is a Hong Kong actress and cantopop singer. She is the ex-wife of Nicholas Tse, thus being the daughter-in-law of Patrick Tse and Deborah Lee. She and Nicholas have two sons, Lucas and Quintus Tse...

in the lead roles and the studio revealed that while it would share some similarities with Mr. & Mrs. Smith, it would feature a new storyline. The budget for the film has been set at $18.7 million and filming is scheduled to start in March 2012.
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