My favorites always involve the intersection of small-scale and large-scale catastrophes. In particular, I appreciate stories where troubled marriages collide with epic calamities that somehow reshape the couple’s personal priorities. I’m thinking here of recent fare like Outbreak (1995), Twister (1996), and The Abyss (1989), movies where intense stress and near-tragedy catalyze a couple’s healing process. For me, the nature of the threat (virus, tornado, alien) matters less than the changing nature of the central characters’ relationship.

At this point, I’m sure you’re wondering what all this has to do with the latest flick from Doug Liman, the director of the superb The Bourne Identity (2002) and the more problematic Go (1999). The joyless liaison between John (Brad Pitt) and Jane (Angelina Jolie) may not encounter any volcanoes, meteors, or sudden climate changes, but one could argue their marital dysfunction creates enough mayhem and destruction to itself constitute a “disaster,” if a sometimes comedic one. The bullets and knives that fly from their hands do, after all, demolish their own home, wreck an office suite, and fill the local home improvement store with a few hundred extra holes.

Before their conflicts spills into the street—before they each discover, that is, that their spouse is an assassin working for the competition—their relationship is already on the rocks. Within the confines of their home, domestic = pacific and, well, apathetic. Approaching seven years of marriage, they’ve grown accustomed to minimal conversation, a loss of spontaneity, and virtually no physical intimacy. They’ve the itch usually accorded their length of time together, but haven’t the motivation to scratch it. Marital counseling sessions stir up more dust than flame: they don’t even seem to care enough to truly get angry.

Until they discover one another’s secret . . . At this point, their interactions get pumped full of all kind of energy and passion; they spend the next half hour trying to kill each other. To enjoy the mayhem which ensues, of course, some viewers will need to suspend their . . . discomfort with over-the-top violence and especially spousal abuse. If you can’t switch into comic-book mode, if watching a married couple dole out abuse onto one another will not make you laugh under any circumstances, don’t watch this movie. It will disturb you. For those willing to wait out the spousal conflict, you may find yourselves pleased by the movie’s ending and the couple’s predictable reunion. There’s a wonderfully preposterous scene that involves John and Jane shooting at enemies over one another’s shoulders, interlocking arms and rotating in a dance of death that successfully protects the other from impossible odds.

After joining forces against a common enemy and opening their true histories to each other (they get an enviable opportunity to rediscover one another’s real past while on the run, sorting haphazardly through years of equivocation and lies), they find that their relationship has become an exciting adventure. In the last hour or so of the movie, they take turns strategizing and leading, melding their distinct strengths into an effective force for survival. From this point out, they’ll probably continue to work together professionally like those couples in True Lies (1994) or Spy Kids (2001). The really exciting journey, however, will be the one their marriage takes. I liked the director’s decision to end, not with the two departing on a joint mission as in these other family spy movies, but with the couple back in counseling, happily reporting on the improved status of their relationship, the newly healthy dynamic wrought by the recent crisis.

What C. S. Lewis said of obedience he also applied to marriage more generally, noting that both should be “more like a dance than a drill” because in healthy relations between man and woman, “the roles are always changing” (That Hideous Strength 149).