You’d think that Hollywood would know better than to try to re-create a film so dependent on the singular steaminess of its leads—and yet, like most things you may adore from barely five iPhone generations ago, it has indeed been remade. The 2024 version of Mr. & Mrs. Smith is Donald Glover’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, an Amazon Prime Video series that premieres on Friday, starring Glover as John and PEN15’s Maya Erskine as Jane. After a multiyear wait and the departure of Erskine’s predecessor, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the only question on anyone’s mind remains: Is this Mr. & Mrs. Smith as sexy as the original?
Co-created by Glover and Francesca Sloane, who worked with Glover on Atlanta, the new Mr. & Mrs. Smith inverts the premise of the 2005 movie. Here, John and Jane are strangers until an agency pairs them up as work partners who must operate under the guise of marriage. You might be thinking that this plot is more reminiscent of the 1996 Mr. & Mrs. Smith television series starring Scott Bakula and Maria Bello—there are too many iterations of this story!— and, though you may be right, this is explicitly supposed to be a remake of the Brangelina film. There’s no question about it: By design and by the grace of its leads, the show can’t re-create the same sexual tension that was present in the movie. But that’s a good thing.
Glover and Erskine are attractive people, but it was always going to be a tall order for them—or anyone, for that matter—to be as alluring as Pitt and Angelina were in the mid-aughts. It wasn’t just their looks; between Jolie’s sultry voice and Pitt’s swagger, they radiated sensuality and temptation. Glover and Erskine—who are comedic actors, for one, rather than blockbuster movie stars—had no chance of delivering the effervescence of Brangelina. That’s a blessing; the last thing we need is another failed, one-to-one remake of something that we already have available on multiple streaming platforms (yes, even Tubi). Our new Smiths offer something else entirely: relatability, of the kind that you would find in a romantic comedy. The awkward charm they exude will have you assessing how alike you are to the characters, rather than how alike you’d wish to be.
What these new Smiths give us is an actual study in marriage, albeit under unusual circumstances. While 2005’s Smiths were hot for each other, these Smiths are still figuring out intimacy. From the setup alone, we know that John and Jane are going to fall for each other, rom-com-style, and assume an actual marriage, but what is so unexpectedly delightful is the tender way they get there. We watch this John and Jane take the baby steps of any romance, which involves highly domestic discussions about washing the dishes and making the tricky transition from sleeping in separate beds to sharing the same one. Glover and Erskine do have fantastic chemistry, and are even sexy at times, but their spark is most believable when they’re riffing off of each other or learning, as many early couples do, how to exist in the same space. One of the funniest—and most painfully relatable—scenes involves Jane being embarrassed about farting in her sleep. They ask each other about their worst traits and their pasts, and it’s a sign of their deepening relationship that their answers become less and less shrouded in covert mystery over time.