Mr & Mrs Smith review: Donald Glover’s slick spy series is a sure-fire hit, and Amazon’s long-overdue apology for Citadel

Also read – Citadel review: Generic and uninspired, Priyanka Chopra’s Prime Video spy show is an epic mess

The writing in these first couple of episodes is electric. It doesn’t at all seem like they’ve been paired together by a shady organisation with the purpose of carrying out covert, often life-threatening missions. Watching their awkward first interactions, you’d assume that they’ve been set up by one of their friends. They talk over each other, unsure of when to speak. They discover each other’s personal boundaries, usually by crossing them. But Jane makes one thing very clear: she’s not in it for the romance.

John isn’t so sure. They are, after all, living together in the same house, pretending to be man and wife. But their behaviour in the first episode, especially after they’ve moved into their fabulous New York brownstone, isn’t unlike what you’d observe in couple who’ve had an arranged marriage. In one scene, John walks into Jane’s room without a shirt, and it’s not like he had ulterior motives, but Jane doesn’t know that, even though every single viewer will be screaming at them to get together by this point.

And a lot of this is down to Glover and Erskine’s genuine chemistry — they’re like the new-age Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn — and writing that feels real and lived-in. Entire scenes in Mr & Mrs Smith are dedicated to these two characters having regular conversations about life, like Jesse and Celine from the Before Trilogy. Mr & Mrs Smith is actually just a romantic comedy; the espionage is entirely incidental to the plot. The missions themselves are refreshingly low-stakes. In the first episode, for instance, all that John and Jane have to do is stalk a middle-aged lady at a cafe, steal the box she’s carrying, and deposit it at a particular location. They don’t have any high-tech gear, nor is there any handler barking instructions into their ear. They rely mostly on their iPhones, their wits, and each other.

Unlike how things were handled in Citadel, or even in Heart of Stone, information about the shadowy organisation in Mr & Mrs Smith is given not in sudden bursts of exposition, but in a most organic fashion, across several episodes. John and Jane learn about the hierarchy of their company not through a terse conversation with an informant, but on a couples date with two other ‘Smiths’ with far more experience. These characters are played by Parker Posey and Wagner Moura, who appear alongside a revolving door of other guest stars across the show’s eight episodes.

As sleek as Mr & Mrs Smith can often be — the visual template for the show has been set by director Hiro Murai, who previously worked with Glover on Atlanta and Guava Island — the structure is very old-fashioned. In every episode, John and Jane are sent on new missions, which invariably involve popular guest stars. Ron Perlman shows up as a cowardly billionaire, while John Turturro stars as a real-estate mogul with skeletons in his closet. Later in the season, Michaela Coel drops by as a formidable rival spy, and Sarah Paulson delivers a scene-stealing performance as a marriage counsellor.

Read more – Heart of Stone movie review: A big waste of Alia Bhatt’s talents, the new Netflix film is beautifully filmed but badly written

After the lowkey charm of the first couple of episodes, however, the narrative expands to positively Bond-like proportions later on. Episode five, for instance, is set almost entirely in Lake Como, and features an outstanding chase sequence that begins on the sloping streets of the idyllic town and spills over onto its narrow alleys, before ending on the placid waters of the lake itself. Mr & Mrs Smith is the rare streaming tent-pole that exceeds expectations.

Mr & Mrs Smith
Creators – Francesca Sloane, Donald Glover
Cast – Donald Grover, Maya Erskine, Parker Posey, Wagner Moura, Paul Dano
Rating – 4.5/5