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Friday, June 10, 2005

Killer chemistry fuels action

Review: Pitt, Jolie light up the screen in the flavorful action-

romance 'Mr. and Mrs. .'

By CRAIG OUTHIER

The Orange County Register

You haven't seen foreplay until you've seen Angelina Jolie and Brad

Pitt beat the beautiful out of each other in " Mr. and Mrs. , " a

sly, comically serrated romantic thriller that uses deadly games of

deceit and intrigue as a handy metaphor for marital infidelity.

Though screenwriter Simon Kinberg ( " xXx: State of the Union " )

receives original story credit, the script appears to be equally

flavored by two previous " Mr. and Mrs. " offerings: a 1941

Alfred Hitchcock screwball comedy with Carole Lombard and

Montgomery, and a short-lived 1996 television series starring

Bakula and Bello as spies who pose as a married couple.

In the current incarnation, directed by " Bourne Identity " action

maestro Doug Liman, the s are deep-cover assassins who are

really married, but mutually ignorant of their shared line of work.

Naturally, this living of secret lives has taken a toll on their six-

year marriage, which has grown cold and loveless as the spouses

traipse off to various corners of the world to double-tap moles and

blow up motorcades.

In essence, they're cheating on each other, a possibility the

filmmakers invite us to take literally in the film's early scenes.

After a late night at " work, " mild-mannered engineer

(Pitt) returns to his leafy suburban New York home with a swipe of

red on his collar (in retrospect, it ain't lipstick), while Jane

(Jolie) dons leather lingerie and makes furtive late-night

visits to swanky hotels. Could her " temp agency " actually be some

kind of high-class call-girl ring?

Her clients should be so lucky. In fact, Jane's temp agency is a

front for a cloak-and-dagger boutique commanded by a barely-seen

bureaucrat ( from " Crash " ) and staffed exclusively by

gorgeous women (think " Charlie's Angels " with machine guns).

Similarly, 's construction firm fronts a " Three Days of the

Condor " -style franchise operation he shares with Eddie ( " Old School "

cut-up Vince Vaughn), a fidgety, love-scarred divorcé who might be

the world's only professional killer who still lives with his mother.

The s' marriage continues to languish in a persistent

vegetative state - a spiceless routine of neighborly chit-chat,

housework and emotional neglect - until and Jane are

unwittingly dispatched to terminate the same federal witness in a

legal case that could be potentially embarrassing to their

respective agencies. Suffice to say, the target escapes, their

covers are blown, and and Jane realize that their marriage has

been nothing more than a six-year sham.

Given 48 hours by their nemesis employers to " clean things up " - an

ultimatum that manifests itself in a delirious sequence of shoot-

outs, bombings and punishing, expertly shot hand-to-hand combat

scenes - the s naturally assume that they've reached the end of

their relationship. That, of course, is camp.

In endeavoring to kill each other, and Jane stir up old

feelings. In exchanging armor-piercing rounds, they enjoy a new

sense of marital transparency. It's not the end of their marriage.

It's the beginning.

Hitchcock's original " Mr. and Mrs. " featured a similar

conceit, but whereas that film was about the romance-reviving joys

of breaking rules (Montgomery only becomes attracted to Lombard

after he realizes that their marriage was never on the books), this

one turns on the delight of disclosure. A typical scene has Pitt and

Jolie bantering about the real identity of her parents while leading

three armored BMWs on a high-speed, metal-crunching car chase over

the Long Island Expressway. It's a sexy, viscera-tweaking juggling

act, and Liman - whose diverse resume includes " Swingers " and " Go " -

pulls it off without a hitch.

Whenever a pair of co-stars engage in a real, highly publicized

affair - as Jolie and Pitt supposedly have - they always run the

risk of overshadowing their on-screen chemistry. That never happens

here. For one, both of them are chemistry kits unto themselves

(Jolie, leaping off balconies and zip lining between skyscrapers, is

like some carnal second coming of Poppins). Secondly, they seem

to have a genuine mutual appetite, whetted by Kinberg's spritzy,

sardonic wordplay.

The film's moral that marriage is drag-out battle - not between the

spouses, ideally, but against the world at large - comes to a rather

flip, theatrical conclusion, but that's hardly grounds for

annulment. If one is to enjoy " Mr. and Mrs. , " one must

anticipate and savor the moment when the s drop their " War of

the Roses " act and direct their butt-kicking talents outward. In

that sense, Pitt and Jolie give us what might be the greatest scene

of make-up sex in the history of cinema - not for what we see (very

little, actually), but for the epic marital spat that precedes it.