I have an aversion to PG-13 rated action movies. Invariably, I get the sense that the director is holding back — there’s absent or rare blood on the screen, violence which moves off screen as it becomes more intense and a general lack of suspense. For example, X-Men was fine — I didn't mind seeing it once — but I would have preferred not to have spent $8 to see it in a theater. And don’t even get me started on how awesome Anakin’s lava scene in Episode III could have been with an R rating.
For many years, there was only one PG-13 action film which I thought of as worthy of repeat viewings, Goldeneye (aka Bond 17) which also happens to be my favorite Bond movie (yeah, yeah, pipe down you Connery nuts in the back — his films were good too, but they just seem a bit anachronistic to me these days). As it turns out, I joined Netflix earlier this year and I’ve recently added two other films to that list — Hellboy and one other film which I’ll get to in a moment. (Then again, is Hellboy perhaps more of a sci-fi movie or even a comic book movie than an action flick?)
The film Mr. and Mrs. Smith opened this weekend and I’ve been largely doing my best to ignore it. At first, its mere PG-13-ness put me off; soon after, the hype surrounding supposed Pitt/Jolie affair made me even less interested in the flick. However, I looked it up on IMDB and learned that Doug Liman directed it — the same guy that directed The Bourne Identity.
You may have already seen where this is going, but The Bourne Identity is the remaining item on my list of PG-13 movies that I would consider seeing multiple times. I rented it through Netflix and watched it a few weeks ago. It’s almost two hours long but I didn’t find myself checking my watch at any point during the movie. The acting was good and the action was fairly lively within the confines of its rating.
Getting back to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I realized that I couldn’t completely discount the Liman effect. Granted, not every director makes great movies every single time, but even if Mr. and Mrs. Smith was half as good as The Bourne Identity, it’d still be a fun time. I then checked Metacritic to see how critics scored it. (Metacritic, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a movie review site that publishes a “Metascore” based on an aggregate sampling of many critics’ reviews.)
I’ll concede that Mr. and Mrs. Smith didn’t actually do very well at Metacritic, at least not in the conventional sense; it got 55/100. However, among the critics that I’ve found to be reliable — and which have tastes in movies similar to mine — they mostly liked it:
The Onion (A.V. Club) / Scott Tobias — “Rarely does a word like “deft” come to mind when viewing any film released between May and August, but Liman and company make it all look easy.”
Film Threat / Clint Morris — “Thankfully, Liman’s film is not the equivalent of a piece of stale cheesecake — all look, no taste — because the script’s as tight as a scout-tied noose.”
Salon.com / Stephanie Zacharek — “Some people will see “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” as cynical, but I think its heart is deeply romantic, admittedly in an anvil-on-the-head kind of way.”
I’m not saying that I’m ready to sing the praises of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But, it’s probably better than I initially thought it was — maybe even venturing into “good” territory. If nothing else, I’ll toss it into my Netflix queue if I don’t end up seeing it in theaters.