Mr & Mrs Smith review: Sharon Horgan makes a cameo in this joyless clunker

The original Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie Mr & Mrs Smith from 2005 is best remembered for giving the world Brangelina, the celebrity portmanteau to rule them all. But it was also a fun action comedy about a boring married couple who, unbeknown to each other, were super-assassins for hire.

A small screen adaptation has been in the works for quite a while: at one point, Phoebe Waller-Bridge was slated to write, produce and star. The Fleabag star had been partnered with Donald Glover, the actor and musician best known for surreal comedy Atlanta. They would star in and collaborate behind the scenes on the reboot. Alas, the duo failed to gel creatively, and Waller-Bridge exited to play Indiana Jones’s annoying sidekick last year. “Collaboration is like a marriage, and some marriages don’t work out,” she said of her departure.

That left Glover steering Mr & Mrs Smith (Prime Video from Friday). Despite Waller-Bridge’s absence, there was every reason to believe he might do something interesting with the property: Atlanta, after all, was an unsettling tour de force, blending dark humour with a David Lynch flair for seeing the uncanny in the everyday. Sadly all that potential has gone to waste. Mr & Mrs Smith is a joyless clunker – a dour and bizarre thriller that suffers from a honking lack of chemistry between Glover’s John Smith and Maya Erskine as his secret agent wife, Jane (stepping in for Waller-Bridge).

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One early mistake is to muck about with the premise of the movie. In this version, John and Jane are strangers who sign up to a mysterious security agent and are required to pose as husband and wife – in other words, the reverse of the Brad and Angelina premise and one that owes more to Cold War drama The Americans.

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It might have worked had Glover and Erskine shared a similar comedic sensibility. But there is no energy between them. Glover seems grumpy; Erskine comes across as visibly anxious as she desperately tries to milk laughs from a moribund script.

The only real fun with Mr & Mrs Smith is keeping count of the many guest cameos. John Turturro turns up as a pervert property mogul, Paul Dano as a creepy neighbour. In episode three, there’s an extended cameo by Sharon Horgan as a depressed millionaire on an unhappy skiing holiday with her husband and their child.

Horgan is always committed, but she also always plays Sharon Horgan, which turns out to be a problem when she encounters Glover, who only ever plays Donald Glover. Their scenes together are low-energy and glum – lifetimes away from the zing of Horgan’s own work. It is a blunt reminder that some things are best left in the past. Our obsession with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie is one of them. Mr & Mrs Smith is another.