Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005 film)

Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a 2005 American action comedy film directed by Doug Liman and written by Simon Kinberg. The film stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as a bored upper middle class married couple, who each are surprised to learn that the other is also an assassin, belonging to competing agencies and that they have been assigned to kill each other. Besides being a box office success,  Mr. & Mrs. Smith also established Pitt and Jolie's personal relationship.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith was released in the United States on June 10, 2005 and received mixed reviews from critics. The film grossed $487.3 million worldwide, becoming the seventh highest-grossing film of 2005.

Plot
John Smith, a construction executive, and his wife Jane, a tech support consultant, are at marriage counseling, where they reveal that they have been married for five or six years, but their marriage is on the rocks. They talk about how they first met in Bogotá, Colombia, claiming to be together to avoid being questioned by Colombian authorities. The two fell in love and got married.

In reality, John and Jane are both skilled field operatives working for separate contract-killing firms and are both among the best in their field. They are also adept at concealing their true profession from each other. The Smiths live in a large Colonial Revival house in the New York suburbs, keeping up appearances by reluctantly socializing with their "conventionally" wealthy neighbors. Underneath their cover stories, John and Jane balance their marriage, which is apparently mundane—after a few years, both agree it is becoming dull and suffocating—with their secretive careers.

After they are both assigned to kill DIA prisoner Benjamin "The Tank" Danz in a prison transfer, they run into each other on the job and the hit is botched. Danz survives and John and Jane are assigned to kill each other instead. After attempts on each other's lives escalate, the Smiths' conflict ends in a massive shootout which nearly demolishes their house. During a protracted and evenly-matched fight, they pull guns aiming at each other. John declines to shoot saying that he loves Jane and lays his gun down. Jane discovers that she cannot shoot John either and they spend a passionate night together.

The renewed Smith partnership is quickly threatened by their employers, who join forces to eliminate the couple. Eddie, John's best friend and co-worker, turns down a bounty of $400,000 for each of them. The Smiths find themselves under attack from an army of assassins. Their pockmarked house is blown up and the Smiths steal their neighbor's minivan. They are able to destroy their attackers' pursuing armored sedans, while bickering about their fighting styles and personal secrets they have discovered about each other. They meet with Eddie and decide to save their marriage. The Smiths kidnap Danz from his high-security prison to use as a bargaining chip.

Danz tells them that he is merely bait and an intern hired by each of their employers after they discovered the Smiths were married; his clients hoped the Smiths would kill each other. Discarding each of their contingency plans, the Smiths make a last stand together, fending off an assault inside a home decorating store by heavily armed operatives. In the aftermath, the Smiths meet their marriage counselor again and say that their marriage is thriving.

Cast

 * Brad Pitt as John Smith
 * Angelina Jolie as Jane Smith
 * Vince Vaughn as Eddie
 * Adam Brody as Benjamin "the Tank" Danz
 * Kerry Washington as Jasmine
 * Keith David as Father
 * Chris Weitz as Martin Coleman
 * Rachael Huntley as Suzy Coleman
 * Michelle Monaghan as Gwen
 * Stephanie March as Julie
 * Jennifer Morrison as Jade
 * Perrey Reeves as Jessie
 * William Fichtner as Dr. Wexler, the marriage counselor (uncredited)
 * Angela Bassett as the voice of Mr. Smith's boss, Atlanta (uncredited)

Production
In July 2000, it was announced Summit Entertainment had purchased screenwriter Simon Kinberg's spec script Mr. and Mrs. Smith with Weed Road Pictures slated to produce. Kinberg had written and sold the screenplay while working as a grad student for Columbia University's film program. Producers had managed to secure Brad Pitt for one of the leads, but the original choice of Nicole Kidman dropped out due to scheduling conflicts with The Stepford Wives leaving the film without a co-lead. This even led to Pitt dropping from the film. The directorial team considered Will Smith and Catherine Zeta-Jones as well as Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett, Gwyneth Paltrow and Gwen Stefani before they were finally able to sign Jolie. Once Jolie was signed, Pitt was back in and the pair was set.

Casting
Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman were originally cast as the leads when Doug Liman received the script. However, Kidman's shooting schedule conflicted with Liman's at the time and she had to exit the film, and Pitt dropped out as a result. Liman then considered Will Smith and Catherine Zeta-Jones as the leads. Liman also considered the pairing of Johnny Depp and Cate Blanchett for the film. Gwen Stefani also auditioned for Jane Smith. The casting of the two leads was set once Liman was able to sign Angelina Jolie. Once Jolie was signed, Pitt re-committed to the film.

John Leguizamo was offered the role of Eddie, but he turned it down as he was going to get paid on scale; a decision he later regretted.

Kinberg had an idea for a screenplay after listening to a couple of his friends who went to marriage therapy. He thought it sounded "aggressive and mercenary" and felt "it would make an interesting template for a relationship inside of an action film."

Music
Two soundtrack albums were released from the film: a soundtrack album by various artists and a film score composed by John Powell. The albums were released at different times to avoid confusion; the soundtrack was released on June 7, 2005, and the score on June 28, 2005.

Box office
Mr. & Mrs. Smith opened on June 10, 2005 in the United States and Canada in 3,424 theaters. The film ranked at the top in its opening weekend, accumulating $50,342,878. Mr. & Mrs. Smith went on to gross $186,336,279 in North America and had a worldwide total of $478,207,520. It was the highest-grossing film for both superstars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but was later surpassed by World War Z for Pitt and Maleficent for Jolie.

Critical response
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gave Mr. & Mrs. Smith an approval rating of 60% based on 212 reviews, with an average score of 6.10/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Although this action-romance suffers from weak writing and one too many explosions, the chemistry generated by onscreen couple Pitt and Jolie is palpable enough to make this a thoroughly enjoyable summer action flick." At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received a rating average of 55 out of 100, based on 41 critics, which indicated "mixed or average reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.

Simon Braund of 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 of Digital Spy gave 4/5 stars, saying "Its ideas are often borrowed, and it's hardly deep and meaningful, but it's a fantastically fun film". Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave 3/4 stars and 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 of San Francisco Chronicle described the film as "awful" and stated that "The tiny smidgen of cleverness on display here is contained entirely in the premise. The follow-through is nonexistent".

Plagiarism accusations
In 2006, New Zealand author Gavin Bishop accused the makers of the movie of plagiarizing his 1997 school book, "The Secret Lives of Mr. and Mrs. Smith", which features a husband and wife living apparently dull suburban lives, but unbeknownst to each other, both work as spies. Bishop stated that he intended to sue, and if a law firm willing to share proceeds, if successful, would approach him.

Inaccurate depiction of Bogotá
The government of Colombia criticized the film in particular for showing the capital Bogotá as a small village in the middle of the jungle with a hot and humid climate. President Alvaro Uribe Vélez and Mayor Luis Eduardo Garzón invited Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and the producers to get to know the city and realize the mistakes they made.

Home media
A single-disc DVD of the film was released on November 29, 2005, and a two-disc unrated version of the film was released on DVD on June 6, 2006. During director Doug Liman's audio commentary which is on the single-disc DVD release, he says that the film was edited for sexual and violent content to get a PG-13 rating. Mr. & Mrs. Smith was released on Blu-ray on December 4, 2007. It includes extra material from the 2005 single-disc DVD release but does not include additional material from the 2006 two-disc unrated version.

Legacy
In 2007, a pilot for a spin-off television series was made for the network ABC. Set six months after the end of the film, it was written by Simon Kinberg and directed by Doug Liman. Kinberg described the proposed television series as "Married... with Children with guns." The roles of John and Jane were played by Martin Henderson and Jordana Brewster. On website The Futon Critic, Brian Ford Sullivan criticized 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.

The film is parodied in Treehouse of Horror XVIII, a 2007 episode of the animated television series The Simpsons.

In June 2010, Jolie said that she and Pitt had inquired about a sequel to the film but were dissatisfied with the story. Jolie remarked, "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."

TV series reboot
In February 2021, Amazon Studios announced that a television series reboot based on the original film, starring Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, was set to be released on Amazon Prime Video in 2022. Due to creative differences Waller-Bridge exited the project in early September 2021 and in April 2022, it was reported that Maya Erskine had replaced her in the main role.

On February 2, 2024 the TV series was released on Amazon Prime Video to critical acclaim.