Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

The answer is that all the planets had to align perfectly, and they did.

1. Jolie and Pitt are just about the biggest stars in the biz, and they are just about the ultimate in potential couples, if the sole criterion is that portion of DNA which controls physical appearance. It would be difficult to name a more beautiful couple, even given a completely blank slate, unrestricted by whether the two people really are a couple. Paul Walker and Jessica Alba? Maybe, but they seem like callow kids, while Pitt and Jolie also have all this talent, all this ... presence. And then the ultimate potential couple seemed to become a couple for real. Not only that, but they never came out and admitted it, and the whole mysterious thing happened in the high media glare which was already upon the Pitt-Aniston relationship.

2. The summer line-ups just seemed to work out perfectly for Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The new releases in the previous week were Cinderella Man (a good picture which bombed), The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and the Lords of Dogtown. The new releases opening directly against Mr. and Mrs. Smith were The Honeymooners, High Tension, and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl. No popcorn. No humor. Nothing for guys. Nothing even close to a hit. That was a summer weekend, with plenty of movie-going dollars to spread around, but if you were looking for some light summer entertainment that weekend, Mr. and Mrs. Smith was just about your only choice from among the movies of the two most recent weeks. The following week brought Batman Returns, an excellent but deadly earnest film which still left all the comedy dollars on the table for the Smiths.

Everything had to work together. Summer. The Competition. The Stars. The Gossip. Take away any of those elements, and this film loses much of its appeal. Take them all away, and it goes nowhere. Make the same movie with Walker and Alba, have those two remain faithful to their previous lovers, release the film in February against a good comedy ... nothin'.

I suppose every successful movie has a touch of genius and a lot of luck, and this was no exception. It obviously had the luck, and the genius was there as well, although it was not filmmaking genius, but marketing genius.

The basic premise of the film? A deadly assassin has taken a wife just to have a cover. Unbeknownst to him, his wife is also a successful assassin who has done the exact same thing. Neither is aware of the other's true career. One day they both happen to be assigned to the same hit and ... well, you get the idea. Their cover blown, they are soon assigned to kill one another, and then they end up working together, blah blah.

The entire film is essentially a deadpan comedy. There is not one moment when their situations can be viewed as credible. They each have surreptitiously assembled massive stashes of documents, money and ammunition in their home - behind paintings, beneath the tool shed, and in the stove, for example - yet neither of them has ever accidentally stumbled upon the other's secrets in their six years of marriage. Think about that - a brilliant secret agent looking for the best place in the house to hide something never thinks of the same places as the other brilliant secret agent living in the same house. They both work for agencies that basically could not exist, let alone compete with one another. They are apparently both immortal, and virtually invulnerable to harm. They employ technology which does not exist. And so forth. I am not objecting to any of those things, which are all perfectly acceptable in a comedy. I'm simply reciting the litany to identify to you that the film is not meant to exist on any other level besides humor. It's a goof. A $110 million gamble of a goof - and it paid off.

You may construe that my making the following comments indicate my having taken the film far too seriously, and I will not dispute that. It is obvious that the filmmakers knew a thing or two about entertaining people because audiences across the world responded very positively with their pocketbooks. The filmmakers and marketers obviously needed no help from me. But for the record, here are my two main thoughts:

• The only really funny moments in the film are those which involve Vince Vaughn as an assassin who still lives with his mom. I suppose the best jokes are probably Vaughn's ad-libs. I would have liked the film much better if Vaughn had been given a bigger part, and had actually seemed to be part of the movie instead of something tacked on after the fact. If Vaughn had been woven into the main fabric of the film, as Tom Arnold was in True Lies, it could have been funnier than it was.  And certainly funnier than Tom Arnold.
• The film is more than two hours long, and the running time is extended not by witty dialogue or creative ideas, but by chase scenes and long gun battles. Of course, since the film is no longer in theaters, that point is no longer crucial. DVD allows us to do the editing which the director failed to do. I experimented, and found out that one can watch this film in 90 minutes on DVD without losing anything even remotely entertaining. I didn't skip any sections, but rather watched them in fast-forward. If you are one of those "half-full" guys, you can spin that very positively: "This film was a major international hit, and is even better on DVD than in the theaters, because the DVD allows you to watch only the material that interests you and to devote only the amount of time you wish to devote." In other words, if you fast-forward through the explosions, car chases, and gun battles, it actually is a pretty tight piece of entertainment.