THE HITMAN AND HER

A WISP of a storyline is stretched across two hours in Mr & Mrs Smith, a glossily packaged comedy-action adventure that trades on star power and firepower.

It shares its title with Alfred Hitchcock's 1941 screwball comedy starring Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery, but unusually for a summer blockbuster, it's not a remake.

Instead, it's a throwback to the star vehicles of the vintage era of celebrated screen couplings - Lombard and Gable, Tracy and Hepburn - in that it relies heavily on the screen presence of its leading actors, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and the chemistry that sparks between them.

Pitt and Jolie deliver in spades. Neither has looked so beautiful as they are here in their physical prime, and the camera adores them. The chemistry they generate together is scintillating, and certain to give grist to the rumour mill about what may have happened off the set.

They play John and Jane Smith, who, in a prologue, meet in Bogota. They appear to be made for each other, having so much in common - far more, in fact, than either realises, given that they operate covertly as professional assassins for rival agencies. So covertly that they cannot even tell each other.

Years later, their relationship is collapsing under the pressures of their demanding jobs and all the elaborate secrecy and deceit they entail. Matters come to a head when they are assigned the same target (Adam Brody from The OC, paying homage to Pitt in a Fight Club T-shirt).

The consequences inevitably recall a couple of Kathleen Turner movies from the 1980s: John Huston's black comedy, Prizzi's Honor, in which Turner and Jack Nicholson play romantically entangled contract killers who become each other's next target, and later, when the gloves come off, Danny DeVito's even blacker The War of the Roses, starring Turner and Michael Douglas as a couple whose marriage disintegrates into mortal combat.

Doug Liman, the director of Swingers, Go and The Bourne Indentity, brings his trademark adrenalin-driven edginess to bear on Mr & Mrs Smith. He evidently relishes all his opportunities for swooping camera moves, dizzying overhead shots and hi-tech effects in the flamboyantly orchestrated action sequences. The pace slackens only in the final reel when the movie turns firmly formulaic.

Composer John Powell effectively accompanies the action with a brisk, jazzy score, and the eclectic soundtrack spans Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, Poison, Gemma Hayes and Air Supply. Incidentally, a Dublin brewery should be well pleased at the prominence of its products in a scene where Mr Smith visits a seedy Irish bar in Manhattan, seeking out a victim played by Dublin native Sean Mahon and inaptly named Lucky.