Mr. (Brad Pitt) and Mrs. (Angelina Jolie) Smith's marriage is on the rocks. They don't seem to really know each other anymore; their sex life is nonexistant; they don't have anything to say to each other. They're trying counseling, but only half-heartedly. It doesn't look like it's going to work out between them. More problems crop up when they're each sent by their respective top-secret agencies to assassinate the same government-held prisoner. Now, in addition to the silence and mistrust, there's gunplay, as each Smith realizes that his or her spouse is also an enemy who must be killed within the next 48 hours.

The film is an uneasy blend of humor and action. Doug Liman, who directed the annoying Swingers and the unexpectedly good The Bourne Identity, has shown that he can handle both, but he still hasn't demonstrated that he can make both work within the same movie. I can't blame him, exactly: this film looked to be one of those expensive no-gos, with stars dropping in and out like crazy, at least four writers doing a reported 50 polishes of the script, and who knows how many directors attached and unattached at various points. Liman came aboard, finished the film, and made it almost watchable.

And that's mostly because of its photogenic leads. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are two of the beautiful people, and they're always nice to look at. They exude charm and sophistication when they want to. And as charming as Pitt can be, Jolie makes him look like a rank amateur. I'm finally convinced that there's something special about her. She's not necessarily a great actress, but she's a great screen presence: she can speak Cary Grant–style volumes with an arched eyebrow or a half-smile. Often, in this film, you can see Pitt trying, and failing, to keep up with her; he falls back on looking sheepish or funny bodily twitches—both of which work for his character, a guy whose very sense of masculinity is called into question when he realizes that his trophy wife can likely do his job as well as or better than he can. One of the biggest laughs comes when they compare numbers of kills; the dialog is obviously about more than just killing people, and Pitt, with his respectable mid-50s count, is outraged when he learns that she's well over 300.

The movie is best when it's about a married couple who inhabit action movies for a living, and falters when it wants to be an action movie itself. Basically, the action should have been on the periphery: we don't need to see the mayhem; it would be funnier if, say, Jolie or Pitt came home from "a hard day at the office" and had to hide or explain various contusions, wrecked cars, shrapnel, whatever. We would wonder what on earth they had been through, instead of judging the somewhat perfunctory action scenes we're provided. Let me explain. The best scenes, by far, are the marriage counseling scenes and the initial scene after each Smith discovers that the other is a secret agent. The counseling scenes work because the actors seem so uncomfortable around each other—I read that those scenes were filmed first, before Pitt and Jolie had gotten to know each other. The dinner scene where each Smith is gauging the other's actions, trying to decide whether to break out the guns and start shooting, is a masterpiece of pacing. It's so tense, and also so funny, that had the film attempted to maintain that balance, perhaps it would have failed, but it most certainly would have been more interesting than the shoot-em-up that so quickly resulted. I'm not saying that action should have been excised from the film, because some of the action works, but it's the humorous action of, say, Pitt's gun accidentally going off when he's trying to stop Jolie from driving away, or Pitt and Jolie arguing via security camera as Pitt attempts to infiltrate her headquarters. The film didn't add anything to the action movie genre, and I would argue that by simply not trying, and concentrating instead on the humorous tension, it would have been much better.

And now we get to the part where goatdog gives away the ending so he can complain about it. I defy you—I implore you—to explain how the twist at the end makes any sense at all, how it means anything except another 15 minutes of splosions and shooting in a film that desperately needed to be shorter? So it turns out that Mr. and Mrs. Smith were sent to the desert location to kill each other because the powers that be were upset that they married each other. Um, no, that just doesn't make any sense. Why not just blow them up in their house? Why go to all the trouble of sending them to the Mexican desert to assassinate a plant, a fellow agent in an expensive convoy with other agents guarding him? Why not just send them on separate missions and kill them? Why wait five or six years after the marriage to decide to kill them? And then there's the who: who decided to kill them? Their respective agencies are enemies of each other, right? Is there a third agency that acted as a mediator? The entire movie stops making sense with the revelation of this big twist.

It's yet another example of a Hollywood film that doesn't know when to say when. One more twist, one more action scene...it seems almost desperate, along the lines of the 1950s Cinemascope monstrosities that so desperately wanted to lure audiences out of their living rooms and away from their televisions. Tell me this: is that last action scene going to draw any more people in? Of course not—people who want to see the movie will already see it, and there's nothing in that last sequence that would draw anybody else in. It's not even featured in the trailer. So why waste the millions of dollars to shoot it, to turn it into a bloated two-hour movie instead of a sleek 90-minute movie? It seems like it would be a net loss: subtract the cost of that last sequence from the film's profits, and subtract however much they lose because theaters have to cut one daily showing. But what the hell do I know, except that the movie would have been a lot better had it ended earlier.