As well as being a straightforwardly fun action-comedy, Mr. & Mrs. Smith also offers a refreshing vision of gender relations and marriage in the adventure film - a genre not famous for images of empowered women.

The titular Smiths apparently live the 'perfect' married life: he's a successful engineer, she's a successful stockbroker, they have a huge white house in the suburbs, they have two cars, they have just bought new curtains. Right down to their first names (John and Jane) the film is intent on showing us a picture-postcard stereotype of humdrum domestic bliss only to then blow it apart - literally.

The most extended fight the couple share takes place in their happy home, and it smashes the place to pieces. Firing huge automatic weapons, exploding kitchen furniture, blowing holes in corridor walls, beating the living crap out of each other in the living room (including a great kicking-behind-the-sofa visual gag): the film takes clear glee in the destruction of domestic space. Going one better, the carnage then moves to a huge department store - the kind Mr. And Mrs. Smith, and most well-off Americans, would furnish their beautiful house with - and similarly raises it to the ground. This is delirious wish-fulfilment for repressed suburbanites: the destruction of the homely as spectacle. It brings to mind the seductive anarchy offered to the lost street urchins on Pinocchio's (1940) 'Pleasure Island' where children were presented with a perfect family home to ransack, only here there is no moralistic donkey-transformation punishment for the subversive home-wreckers.

There's nothing necessarily so very new about the blowing-apart of the family home for kicks: it happens in many an action-thriller when the bad guys attempt a siege. The nice twist here is that, at first, there are no bad guys: it's the married couple themselves who do the destroying. In a sense, rather than being a good-versus-evil adventure narrative, at this point it's instead the extreme comic endpoint of every something-bad-lurks-beneath-suburbia family drama, except in this film the characters - and the movie itself - absolutely revel in the devastation. When the tables do turn, and the Smiths have to fight an external force, its big business that is the enemy - albeit big assassination-organising business. From here on it becomes husband and wife versus a dark, faceless, swarming corporation.

This is where the movie offers something quite original: its depiction of husband and wife. It is difficult to think of another action film (or many films in any genre) where a married couple are presented as being on quite such an absolutely even-pegging. Firstly, just in terms of gender-power relations alone, the film is atypical: Jolie does zero woman-in-peril cowering, Pitt does no protecting-hero shtick - there is not even any suggestion that the woman here has to learn how to stand up for herself before finally giving a well-placed kick or gunshot to the baddie in the climax. Throughout this film, man and woman are one hundred percent equal, bringing more to mind the lovers-on-the-lam in crime pictures like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or True Romance (1993) than action heroes with women in-tow (although even in these mentioned films it is still generally the man who does all the planning). The final slow-motion, Peckinpah-esque, shoot-out, when Pitt and Jolie circle gracefully around one another, decimating bad guys as they do so, gives us a beautiful and gleeful image of man and woman uniting and sharing mythical status in pop-culture equally.

On top of this, however, Mr. and Mrs. Smith are not just a couple but a married couple - and this is where the film is damn near revolutionary. There have certainly been strong women in action films before - Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 (1991), Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight (1995), the Charlie's Angels (2000) - but they tend not to been equalled on screen by strong men, and are certainly not an item with such men - let alone married to them. This film offers a view of marriage seldom seen in Hollywood because the couple's relationship is not only equal, but also exciting, action-packed and, perhaps above all, sexy. It is practically a running gag in Hollywood that the heat goes out of a relationship when a couple marry: passionate kisses and sex scenes are reserved for newly-blossoming love or extra-marital affairs only. Mr. & Mrs. Smith plays up on this stereotype in its marriage-counselling opening (the question "How would you rate your sex life?" meets simply with an uncomfortable pause), only to throw it out of the window as the discovery of each others' secret lives turns on John and Jane again in a big way. The fight/sex scene in the annihilated home does for marriage something a hundred Four Weddings and a Funerals (1994) could never do: it makes it hot again. By the time they return to the marriage counsellor in the final scene, a smirking and loved-up Mr. and Mrs. Smith embody an image of matrimony that is simultaneously conservative in its reaffirmation of the institution and verging on radical in its proposed resolution of marital bliss coming from mutually assured destruction.