She was a saint, Renée Zellweger, with her brave chin all a-tremble, never saying a harsh word to her husband no matter how the little ones wheezed and shivered in the cruel, cruel cold, nor how many a morning, just to put something in their stomachs, she had to fill up the milk bottle at the tap the way they were watering drinks down at the saloon, not that her Russell Crowe would know anything about that, him being as good a man as ever let another bash in his brains for fifteen rounds and never touched a drop of anything stronger than beer, and only one of those in the whole of Cinderella Man, which ought to show you what a saint he was, never saying a harsh word to Renée Zellweger or so much as glancing sideways at another woman, what with the peripheral vision beaten out of his poor eyes, or threatening to shut one of hers, the way that no-good communist friend of his down at the docks used to frighten the wits out of his own wife, until he was trampled to death by the police in an incident they all very much regretted, it being the Depression and all, which as Russell Crowe explained was nothing more than a run of bad luck that could happen to anyone, so that he had to bury the blackguard atheist in the potter's field before he took up his boxing gloves again to a Celtic drone in the artful cinematographic twilight, and with his tooraloom, tooraloom he bled for us all, because it's better to cheer for one man getting his skull stove in than to pull together with the working stiffs for a Wagner Act that Ron Howard's audience never heard of, and when the last fight was over and Father O'Pratie had lifted his eyes to the God who loves us all, despite His excusable partiality toward the Irish, and the little ones were rosy-cheeked again, and even that Bolshevik's wife was eased in her heart's sorrow, Renée Zellweger knew she'd been right to pucker her brave little mouth and pipe up to Russell Crowe, "You are the champion of my heart, James J. Braddock," because a sentiment like that doesn't belong just in a screenplay, no, but was made to be cut out of the film and played on television to bring in the coppers from all decent men and their decent women, too. A grand story, Cinderella Man--but unlike Seabiscuit, it's got no good reason to make you wade through horseshit.

The least you can say for Mr. & Mrs. Smith is that its lead actors are not too good for this world. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who for months have figured in the tabloids and glossies as old-style Hollywood sinners, introduce the movie and close it out by pretending to participate in counseling sessions, which (although improbable as narrative) allow the stars to play to the camera in thinly disguised scandal-sheet personas. He: sexy, dazzling and reckless. She: sexy, knowing and dangerous. Given the bare and patchwork texture of Simon Kinberg's script, the events between these chats amount to little more than a fanciful backstory for the famous couple. We may now imagine Brad 'n' Angie as a husband and wife who were sunk in suburban boredom until each learned the other was a professional assassin--a revelation that changed deathly marriage into an exciting, kill-or-be-killed situation.

So Mr. & Mrs. Smith belongs to a pair of long-established movie genres: the celebrity self-parody and the therapeutic marital comedy (in which violent bursts of truth-telling and surges of adrenaline lead to hormonal release of another kind). The film's distinction, if you can call it that, lies in its developing the latter genre with blithe amorality: The only good the movie recognizes is good sex. If the prerequisite should be mass murder, then you shouldn't be so uncool as to object--let alone stop to wonder how many corpses have piled up.

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