If you have not seen it, you have seen couple’s Halloween costumes inspired by it: the 2005 comedy-thriller film, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt co-star as a married couple that learn they are both assassins belonging to different agencies. After a mutually botched mission, the couple gets assigned to kill each other. While their marriage may have been lacking in passion, their attempts to kill one another were not. Ultimately though, they are reunited and come together to outsmart their employers. I don’t want to spoil the ending here, but let’s just say, everyone lives happily ever after.
When it was announced that Francesca Sloane and Donald Glover would team up to reimagine this cult classic, there was a lot of pressure for the new series to live up to the iconography created by the original film. The lethal combo of a young Jolie and Pitt alone is enough to make a successful adaptation a true feat. What really worked to the series’ advantage is the almost complete reimagining of the plot that the eight-episode short series exercised.
John (Donald Glover) and Jane (Maya Erskine) are paired together by ‘The Company’—the elusive organization that recruited them—and tasked to pose as a married couple. They muse that as a couple they draw “less attention” when they are out on their missions. As they tackle these difficult and violent tasks, they quickly turn from strangers to colleagues to lovers. While the circumstances of their coming together are anything but ordinary, their romantic struggles are not unlike the average married couple, exacerbated by working and living together.
In between machete-wielding missions in El Salvador and near-death experiences in the Italian Dolomites, they disagree about kids, in-laws, how to spend their money and how they show affection to one another. They share moments of heartfelt understanding and intimacy in a way that only people with shared trauma can. Despite their incompatibility and character flaws, you find yourself rooting for the couple.
These relatively mundane moments are where the show differentiates itself from the original film. The movie is exciting because it’s sexy, high-stakes, action-packed and at the end, two beautiful people return to a beautiful life. The show packs a similar sense of action and risk, but it is coupled with the complications of intimacy between two broken and imperfect people.
It’s like if Jim and Pam from “The Office,” worked as spies in “Mission: Impossible” rather than a paper company.
In an era dominated by nostalgia in the media, remakes almost always leave something to be desired. We witnessed this with the remakes of “iCarly” and “Gossip Girl,” where, in an attempt to modernize the plot, the original allure was lost. But the “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” series adds much more to the original premise and redefines how spinoffs can successfully take the audience in a whole new direction.