6-15-05,10:02am

From Morning Star

Reviewed by Ethan Carter

Directed by Doug Liman



HOLLYWOOD heroes and heroines have more blind good fortune than even impossibly evasive and unpardonable Peter Mandelson. This lively if essentially mindless action thriller proves the point, since the eponymous married couple, played by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, are missed by more bad guy bullets than have been fired in the Bush-Blair wars.

Actually, if villains could shoot straight, most Hollywood thrillers would be very short indeed.

That said, Liman - responsible for the unexpectedly good The Bourne Identity - does a briskly efficient job in bringing Simon Kinberg’s screenplay to visceral life.

The premise is simple, as proved by The War of the Roses and Prizzi’s Honor. A bored suburban couple whose marriage is teetering turn out to be expert professional assassins whose relationship is homicidally revitalised when they’re sent to kill each other.

Forget Viagra - the imminent possibility of death proves as potent an aphrodisiac and, in true Tinsel Town tradition, violence leads to unbridled sexual passion and fulfilment.

Despite the high body count - actually, most corpses are unnamed extras so that emotional involvement in their demise is nil - it’s essentially light-hearted.

“We’ll talk about this later,” says Pitt when Jolie’s ill-aimed knife accidentally skewers his thigh.

And then there’s Jolie, deliciously decked out as a dominatrix who could raise a statue’s blood pressure, binding a victim before professionally snapping his neck.

Yes, in the right Hollywood context, death can be good, dirty fun - comic book-style staging robs sadistic scenes of their basic cruelty.

Like Bond movies, violence is Tom and Jerry-style, albeit with convincing blood. The convention works well enough for the frequent outbursts of action, carnage and motorised mayhem punctuating the couple’s family feuding.

However, Pitt’s brutal kicking of Jolie – we see the action, not the result as she’s hidden behind a convenient sofa – does strike an uncomfortable note.

Fortunately, wisecracking screwball movie dialogue soon soothes the memory.

What ensures the film its inevitable mass-market multiplex success is not so much the story or the action. No. It’s the patent sexual chemistry between the stars that drives the show so forcefully, even without knowledge of their much-heralded off-screen relationship.

Who knows, like Tom Cruise conveniently finding yet another new love in time to promote his latest film, Pitt and Jolie’s romance might simply be a publicity ploy.