Ticket Stubs #55: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. the Ticketmaster,
Wishing you a Happy Valentine's Day!

As mentioned in Ticket Stubs #54: National Treasure & Lord Of War, the reviews for today and next week's Valentine's-ish Ticket Stubs selections fit into the "not able to find what issue number it came from" category. I know I wrote it some time between the National Treasure review and my review of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (which will be getting a Ticket Stubs release later this month), but I don't have an offline copy of the review anywhere, and it was most likely published on Yahoo! Groups, Today.com, or MySpace (none of which exist in their original forms). But I do have a date of publication FROM that era (February 14, 2006), and it was posted on the SW@ Ticket Archive (which I am attempting to fold into the Just the Ticket sequence right now) as part of SW@ Ticket Archive #49: Fun With Guns, a triple-feature of Fun With Dick & Jane, Lord of War, and the relationship vehicle for then-ship-fusion-originators, "Brangelina," Mr. & Mrs. Smith (because the post title made it pretty obvious).

Speaking of pretty obvious, the calls to action go here, so please share the love by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your true feelings at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and choo-choo-choose me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest heart-shaped boxes of news on my content.

We begin Part Two of the Fun With Guns trilogy with something that will only make total sense next week if you are my age:
Meet Brangelina.
They look good.
See the Smiths shoot at each other.
Run, Brangelina, run.
Type, Ticketmaster, type!

Not since True Lies has such an impossible, ludicrously action-packed movie made for such great entertainment. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie star as John and Jane Smith (as opposed to Dick and Jane Harper, whom we will meet next week), assassins for rival contract companies, each not knowing the other is an assassin until the two are called upon to kill each other. Plotwise, that's about it. (F, anyone?) Of course, they look good on camera, together or not. (D? Maybe C? Could this movie work on explosions and sex alone? I don't think so.) But there's one tweak (one dare not call it a twist...not yet anyway) that keeps the movie going and nudges it, slowly but significantly, above par: Brad and Angelina are rival assassins John and Jane, but they are also Mr. & Mrs. Smith, just your average squabbling married couple (with secret arsenals, dressed like Ecks vs Sever rejects, but I repeat myself) who love each other, but--mainly in the literal sense--want to kill each other. It's all crash-boom-bang and wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, but more so, it is the feelings, secrets, words, and actions of a real-world marriage played out in a sort of silver screen fantasy.

OK, you can call it a twist now.

A

I hope you enjoyed this old journey through my increasingly positive opinion of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. I might come back to it in the future because as good as I thought it was at the time, I have a vague memory of it just looking sexy and cool and then ending before it could say or resolve anything.

Whatever the case will be when that time comes, please continue to share the love by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your true feelings at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and choo-choo-choose me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest heart-shaped boxes of news on my content.
And before you go, the original Fun With Guns post ended with some Coming Distractions of reviews that I attempted to use as ordinal context when attempting to locate it in my archives. They now exist as old Ticket Stubs on this blog, and you can check them out at the following links:

• Hustle & Flow
• Broken Flowers
• Red Eye and Flightplan

Ticketmaster,

Out.