What Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that this film features repeated and sustained violent scenes, involving guns, explosions, and knives. It's also worth noting that these scenes most often set husband against wife. Following one of these extended shoot-outs, they engage in mostly off-screen sex (some close-ups of limbs and lips serve as prelude). Husband and wife lie to each other, appear in therapy sessions, discuss their lack of intimacy. Jane wears dominatrix gear and wields a crop, just before she snaps her target's neck. John pees in the desert (back to camera). Characters smoke, drink, drive fast, crash, and deploy major weapons.
- Families can talk about the extreme (and darkly comic) representation of workaholic partners and marital stress. How does the movie use a romantic comedy's basic structure (sparring couple, parallel confidantes, zany situations reframed as violence) in order to comment on the high-stress pace of contemporary, two-career marriages? How might John and Jane have avoided tensions by not deceiving one another to start with? What is exciting about keeping secrets? Why is it better to tell the truth?