Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024) is a mix of danger, action, and romance that packs a punch. It’s a unique take on the genre, the spy version of a group project from hell with your crush, and is a ton of fun to watch.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith is billed as a television “reimagining” of the original film with Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie that made headlines for its real-life repercussions. Starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, the show starts at the beginning for the enigmatic Smiths, where two strangers are brought together in an arranged marriage thanks to an ultra-secret spy company.
Tonally wholly different than the movie with the same name, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a darker spy outing where the oftentimes clumsy wetwork and talk of the wetwork is an allegory for dealing with relationship problems in an offbeat, unconventional romance. (Think The Americans instead of True Lies.) There are dangerous spy missions, but as an audience, we’re really watching for the moments these characters share when not blasting or awkwardly stuffing people in tubs. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is about intimacy, and it showcases finding it, keeping it, and losing it.
Both characters have a particular set of skills
It’s clear both characters in the Prime Video spy drama have a particular set of skills and live in a moral grey area. The audience is quickly brought up to speed with who they are in the first episode with a brief moment of shared wavelength over gun specs. The new employees do have some commonalities. How they got those skills and their specific neuroses are unraveled as the 8-episode run continues, but we’re still left with many questions. Our way into understanding John and Jane is through what they reveal to and hide from each other. Their insecurities are what makes them so watchable. And it’s not until they both have an encounter with truth serum that they are totally open.
What’s clear from the get-go is that these are both broken individuals trying to do something new and perhaps better with their lives. Their character motivations for joining Hihi’s company are squarely green, but we can’t fault the duo for wanting money. Mr. & Mrs. Smith does have vulnerable emotional moments between the couple, but they are set against the backdrop of danger that their day (and night) job provides.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith still delivers the big spy action moments
Although Mr. & Mrs. Smith is really a relationship drama, complete with couples counseling thanks to actress Sarah Paulson, it doesn’t hold back on the inventive popcorn action. It delivers on the promise of fights, explosions, beautiful locations, and all the other things you would expect to see from something in the spy genre. (And if you’re a fan of the Mr. & Mrs. Smith movie, the last episode has a massive inventive house-destroying fight that’s a great callback and perfectly choreographed and delivered.)
Although Jane and John are skilled enough to have been hired at the company as high-risk mission specialists, they aren’t perfect spies. They notably fail several of Hihi’s missions. In this way, the characters are similar to Noah Centieno’s Owen Hendricks in The Recruit. But where Owen grows with his spy skills, Jane and John don’t get better at espionage. They’re at the top of their game, clumsy kidnappings of Ron Perlman’s Toby Hellinger and all.
Maya Erskine excels in vulnerability and electrifying espionage
It is not easy to step into roles made mainstream by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, especially if you remember the shared pop culture hysteria accompanying the movie that shares the show’s namesake. But Donald Glover and Maya Erskine in this series have proven themselves up to the task and embody a weird, compelling, and dangerous paranoia that forces camaraderie and love. Jane and John Smith are work husband and wife taken up a notch with this show. We get to revel in the small chaotic moments of their relationship instead of just the big swoon-worthy bits.
Maya Erskine shows off so much range and leads us along in this story. This is such a different role than the bowl-cut Maya in the twisty PEN15. Although Erskine’s Jane may have some sociopathic tendencies, we seriously root for her (and Max!) because of Erskine’s charisma and brilliant and unorthodox comic timing. Between Jane and John, Jane has the strongest arc, and we really get to spend time with her and understand who she is as a person.
Donald Glover also brings all his comic timing skills to play, and deadpan delivery and calmness help subvert the spy expectations. But it’s only in the latter half of the series that Donald Glover totally sheds the comic persona and slips into his character of John Smith. When he fully inhabits the character, the show is so much more fun and becomes truly binge-worthy.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith starts off slow
Mr. & Mrs. Smith starts off slow, and the show, like a couple awkwardly finding themselves stuck with each other for the first time (hello, blind date), struggles to build momentum during the first few episodes. Like their initial explorations of the fabulous and impossibly posh NYC brownstone that the duo now calls home, with Mr. &Mrs. Smith, we must take our time exploring our surroundings and getting our footing.
But it’s quite interesting when things start to get going, and as we get deeper into the spy work and the couple has to trust each other more and deal with the emotional fallout from their profession, the show becomes more exciting. Naturally, two spies who are together are going to have trust issues. The relationship between the Smiths gets more interesting and less forced, too, and the show starts to find its footing. As the show picks up, the charisma between the characters goes from Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston in The Break-Up to something believable and more real. That pull between them, particularly in the last episode, holds together the more tenuous threads in the show.
Will there be a second season of Mr. & Mrs. Smith?
The ending in the finale of Mr. & Mrs. Smith isn’t exactly happy, and there’s one exceptionally shocking moment. But there is room for the couple’s story to continue even with the explosive cliffhanger. There is a certain satisfying symmetry to how it all started, concluded, and is bookended by destruction. Mr. & Mrs. Smith ends how it started. The show could be done with that ambiguous ending, but I really hope not and that we get more. There’s been no announcement from Prime Video, so we’ll have to wait and see.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith is now streaming on Prime Video.
All eight episodes of the spy show are now available. Are you curious about the premiere of the reimagined Mr. & Mrs. Smith? Leave a comment with us on X @MoviesWeTexted to share your thoughts.
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