Better than Brangelina? Spy reboot is witty and fresh
Mr & Mrs Smith was a middling Hollywood spy caper remembered chiefly because Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie fell for each other while making it. And we know how that turned out. Ignoring the bad vibes, Amazon Prime Video has remade it as an eight-part series.
The results feel surprisingly fresh, because show creators Francesca Sloane and Donald Glover have eschewed the easy option – a dumb action thriller – in favour of something wittier and more thoughtful. It has a low-key, slightly 1970s aesthetic, which is where the casting of Glover comes in handy because I can’t think of many other actors who would look good in flares. He can also act, which is a major improvement on the film (Brad Pitt can’t, and that is a hill I will die on).
Glover and Maya Erskine (a role originally pencilled in for Phoebe Waller-bridge, who was also onboard as co-writer, but dropped out due to “artistic differences”) play spies hired by a mysterious agency. They are given the codenames John and Jane Smith, told to pose as a married couple and given a beautifully appointed
New York brownstone as a home.
They are sent out on high-risk missions with only the briefest of instructions, having to play it by ear when they get there. This generally involves having to fight or shoot their way out of dangerous situations in ski resorts, jungles and swanky addresses. One takes them to a luxury hotel in the Dolomites to stake out a wealthy executive played by Sharon Horgan. The guest stars are high quality, including John Turturro, Michaela Coel and Ron Perlman.
While all this high-octane spy stuff is going on, the couple are dealing with the mundanity of married life: dividing up the household chores, complaining that one of them spends too much time on the phone to their mother. At first, John finds it endearing that Jane talks with her mouth full, and when she says, “You’re so annoying,” she’s being playful. A few episodes down the line, and they want to kill each other.
He is a contented soul who likes to do yoga; she is spiky and estranged from everyone in her life. The relationship switches from platonic to romantic early on. This is where things fall down a bit, because Glover and Erskine have zero sexual chemistry. Or maybe that’s deliberate, because they’re in an arranged marriage and are just getting it on for the sake of it. Whatever, they’re always interesting to watch and both have great comic timing. Mr & Mrs Smith is that rare thing: a remake that improves on the original.
‘It’s not a game,” Lord Sugar tells the candidates in The Apprentice (BBC One), because he’s now into his 18th series of insisting that this is a business programme. Oh, Alan. Would a real business programme insist that the women dress like an assortment of Skittles? Or consider giving £250,000 to a man in a black silk shirt who says: “I am going to change the world and create a legacy that reverberates through time?”
If this were a business programme, it would get a zero-star rating. As a comedy, though, it is very funny. That’s partly down to the casting – the programme-makers select the most stupidly un-self-aware – but mostly to the editing, which highlights the stupidity. Example: the scene in which the womens’ team noticed that the “breadcrumbs” on their fish cakes tasted weird, and the camera cut to another part of the kitchen where someone was asking why the crumble mix for their rhubarb dessert had mysteriously disappeared.
The cooking part of the task is what separates the men from the boys. Ollie, a sales executive, encountered a tablespoon for the first time. Things were no better in the womens’ kitchen, where they were perplexed by an oven with a maximum cooking time of two minutes. Reader, it was a microwave.
The competition in this episode involved a corporate away day in the Highlands. Virdi, the men’s team leader, seemed to think that his experience as an “international DJ” would come in handy on a bushcraft and abseiling tour, and interrupted proceedings to lead his group through some bhangra. “We’re going to sell this tour with our personalities,” he said, fatally. His team made a loss, yet Lord Sugar didn’t fire him.
And then there’s Asif, a former doctor turned “wellness” entrepreneur who boasts about his IQ. He was recently exposed for dodgy socialmedia posts, including a rant about the “Zionist antichrist”. The flaw in The Apprentice model is that if you select a candidate because they are a gobby, arrogant plum, on the basis that those traits will make good TV, then it may come back to bite you.
Mr & Mrs Smith ★★★★
The Apprentice ★★★