Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) – Thieves! Half-elf magic users (I’m old-school)! Paladins! Owlbears! Side quests! Artifacts randomly found! The element missing in previous attempts at passive Dungeons & Dragons entertainment media is the humor — not as a spoof, but mimicking the fun interaction of players in a good D&D group.
This is the kind of movie that really justifies all of the millions spent on CGI, putting impossible things on the screen that are just like what a D&D player would imagine it to look like.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) – You can see just where the inspiration for this movie came from. Some hotshot was watching True Lies (1994), in which Arnold Schwarzenegger is a spy/assassin and his wife doesn’t know, and had a brainstorm: What if BOTH of them are spies, but each one doesn’t know about the other? Ten years and 50+ screenplay drafts later, we got a movie that’s much better than 50+ drafts usually yields. (Some sources credit this movie as being inspired by the TV show of the same name that ran for 13 episodes before being canceled in 1996, but besides the title and the two-word premise “married spies,” there’s really no connection… but see below.)
What really hold this movie together is the chemistry between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie; is it any wonder that, shortly after making this movie, Pitt left his then-wife Jennifer Aniston for Jolie?
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024) – Two neophyte agents/assassins, not sure who they actually work for, are assigned to pose as a married couple, despite neither being the type that connects to other people (which explains their aptitude for deep-cover work). Probably based on the short-lived 1996 series of the same name, although I’ve not seen it to judge.
The first episode of this Prime series seems like something I’d have written, in all the wrong ways. I have a tendency in fiction to go for the “slow burn” that, in my first drafts, is cold-molasses slow, and this episode cranks that up to eleven. John and Jane haltingly get to know each other a bit, despite not wanting to open up at all. And yes, there’s an explosion near the end, so SOMETHING happens, but that’s the single punctuation to almost nothing for a full 60 minutes. I didn’t begrudge watching the first episode, but I had absolutely to pull to turning on the second.
Abandoned movies:
Zambo, King of the Jungle (1972) – A white man wrongly convicted of murder escapes a prisoner transfer in Africa into the jungle; within three years, he’s the omnipresent “king of the jungle,” dispensing justice for (and medical advice to) the native tribes. Makes the original Tarzan of the Apes seem like sensitive multiculturalism.
Daguerrotype (2016) – It probably could have been a decent little spooky flick if it didn’t insist on being so danged French: Long shots edited together with no sense of narrative momentum, standoffish characters who interact with each other as little as possible, and of course someone waxing didactic on true art versus commercial sellouts.
Actually, I think that the Mrs. and Mrs Smith that inspired *anything* was nearly ten years prior to the Jolie and Pitt movie. Is that right? Didn’t that series star Scott Bakula and Maria Bello? I’ve never seen it, but I’ve heard/read about it.
And, of course, same name but a completely different plot–Lombard and Gable. Woot.
Yup, that’s the one. And apparently a lot more people heard about it than actually watched it, which is why it only lasted 13 episodes before cancellation.