entertain

Pure, Orwellian kaleidoscopic filth. Nice to watch though-Angelina Jolie is pretty.

A theory of how this film came into being:

The scene is five executives, sitting in a meeting room, trying to come up with an idea for a movie that the audience "will really go gaga for".

"All right, we have Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt under contract. We’ve got the usual, enormous budget. Now all we need is a plot."

"Okay, so what’s worked for decades?"

"Romance, violence, and comedy."

Silence for about a minute and a half.

"I’m drawing a blank."

"Okay, so, Pitt and Jolie, they’re husband and wife. They’re both trained assassins. But they can’t tell each other, because their marriage is just a front and they’re sworn to secrecy. Imagine the high jinks."

"Zounds."

"Someone bring me the rolodex of soulless writers who need the money. Ah, here we go. Perfect. Simon Kindberg."

"What has he written?"

"Mmmm, says here, ‘xXx: State of the Union’ and ‘X-men 3′"

"Wow, he’ll probably be excited to be writing something that isn’t a sequel of a bad movie."

Another short period of silence.

"Excuse me."

"Yes?"

"Is it wrong that we just churn out the same nonsense every summer?"

"You’re new aren’t you?"

This theory is also supported by the fact that the executive producer, Erik Feig, also produced such fine films as I Know What You Did Last Summer, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (currently in production).

This is not to say that the movie does not bounce along enjoyably. It has laughs: Angelina Jolie’s pre-coital head butt. It has action: Brad Pitt pops out of a mini-van to crack a secret agent over the head with a nine-iron. Perhaps that would also go under the laugh category. It has a very distressed and disheveled Vince Vaughn. It has an always-sexy Angelina Jolie. All these things pass a two-hour period very nicely.

Most of the people involved do need to make money. This movie did employ one hundred and forty stunt men and women. It feels good to support Jimmy Ortega and Melissa R. Stubbs. They put their lives on the line so that I could pretend, for ten seconds, that Angelina Jolie really did slide across a rope, between two buildings, forty stories from the ground.

This film is worth a watch, if it happens to be on TV, and you have two hours to burn. The standard three-act formula feels familiar and comforting. It may be a little insulting, but you can numb yourself to that. Can’t you?