Mr and Mrs Smith

Somewhere in the ether Don Simpson is creaming himself.

Mr And Mrs Smith is all about the pitch; two deadly assassins are married without knowing it! Then an assignment brings them into direct competition! It’s a full-scale battle of the sexes with Vince Vaughn quipping from the sidelines! Then they find a common enemy! Coasting along on this dizzyingly high concept jiggery, Doug Liman’s blissfully empty-headed popcorn flick offers the seductive spectacle of two of the planet’s most prepossessing movie stars attempting to kill and fuck each other, often at the same time.

It ought to be the ne plus ultra of kiss-kiss bang-bang cinema and at times it is. Brad and Angelina have never been more impressively carnal; he swaggers about still sporting alpha-bulk gained for Troy, she, following a career spent primarily in police uniform and straight-jackets, finally gets to purr in pop-bondage gear and frocks with side splits to just below the earlobe.

As one of those date movies reliant on an unspoken understanding between couples that they won’t be thinking about each other later on, you could certainly do worse. Shame the script – all predictable turns and dreary post-Tarantino killers-in-suburbia cliches – never ignites in quite the same way as the glittering leads. Nor indeed does the action.

The shockingly poor set-pieces so frequently resemble footage from someone repeatedly falling down flights of stairs with a camera, it’s hard to believe they came from the director of The Bourne Identity.

A similarly slap-happy approach is taken with the rickety editing and gob-smackingly ill-conceived soundtrack. As Brad and Angie are about to get properly down and dirty for the first time (on screen at any rate), the lights dim and ‘Express Yourself’ strikes up on the mix. What the hell? Surely even they couldn’t have fun to that. No film featuring Angelina Jolie with fishnets and a safety whip should leave you feeling so unfulfilled.

Running Time 132mins. Cert 12a. Out Now.