The New Mr. & Mrs. Smith Is Very Different From the Brangelina Film

Loosely based on the 2005 film, the new Mr. & Mrs. Smith TV reboot uses the action-comedy genre to represent how impossible life is for so many people today, with two misfit unemployables turning to assassin work out of desperation.

The eight episodes of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the new Amazon Prime remake of the 2005 Brad Pitt–Angelina Jolie hit movie, play at such a slow tempo, it’s as if you’re watching an experimental attempt to serialize an already-overlong indie art film and foist it on an unwary public.

Whether you can endure what is essentially the injection of action and comedy into something like Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019) might depend on how much you like the lead actors, Donald Glover and Maya Erskine (PEN15), both of whom are versatile, compelling performers. They play misfit unemployables who apply for jobs as assassins and find that the hardest part of their dangerous new lives as John and Jane Smith isn’t the body count — it’s having to pretend to be married. The astonishingly good supporting cast helps too — it’s an unexpected pleasure to see colorful appearances by Paul Dano, Parker Posey, John Turturro, Alexander Skarsgård, Sharon Horgan, Sarah Paulson, Ron Perlman, and other notable talents.

Created by actor-singer-writer-producer Glover and Francesca Sloane, his fellow writer-producer on Atlanta, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is using the action-comedy genre as a way to represent how impossible life is now for so many people, which is a pretty good idea. So we recognize the dehumanizing process of the entirely computerized job interviews our two lead characters go through separately — sitting in a dark booth typing in anxious answers to more and more intrusive questions and having to submit fingernail clippings in tiny plastic bags to a small slot that opens up before them.