Love Means Having to Say, ‘I Feel ...’

It’s hard to pinpoint when the American romantic comedy went in to therapy, though you must assume it was not long after filmmakers started hitting the couch, or at least cruising the self-help bookshelves. Five times on a studio time, romantic comedies involved a man as well as a woman engaged in delicate (or crude) power negotiations. The shrew had to be tamed & the boy had to grow up so they could handle her, or some variation on that idea. That template is still in use, though the banter that accompanied those negotiations has given way to speeches about feelings. Freud might have hit Hollywood decades earlier, but Woody Allen & the generations of funnymen & women they inspired, have a lot to answer for.

Someone involved in the making of “The Back-Up Plan,” a not very nice & yet painless waste of time, has certainly thought through some life & love questions. Written by Kate Angelo & directed by Alan Poul, the movie is essentially a vehicle for Jennifer Lopez, an appealing screen presence with a disappointing big-screen track record. That’s probably not all her fault: romantic roles for women often are the provenance of the bland or the blonde (Jennifer Aniston or Katherine Heigl) or the rare professional wisenheimer (Tina Fey). Angelina Jolie has a lock on the hard chick thing, something Ms. Lopez proved he could do beautifully in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller “Out of Sight,” her best movie to date.

That’s getting ahead of the story, though, which opens with Zoe being artificially inseminated in a fertility clinic by her jokey doctor (Robert Klein, of all people). Terminally single if not a lonely New York gal, Zoe owns a tiny pet store, has a wee disabled dog & five supportive employees (Eric Christian Olsen & Noureen DeWulf), who don’t seem to do over smirk indulgently & play the foil, much as Eve Arden did when movies about strong women in need of a stronger man starred Joan Crawford. Zoe also has a wise grandmother (Linda Lavin), who’s nice for some cutesy, gooey stuff at a retirement home. (Geezers say the darndest things.) But with her father & brother gone, Zoe also has abandonment issues.

“The Back-Up Plan” represents the first time that Ms. Lopez has headlined a movie since “El Cantante,” a 2007 release about the salsa musician Héctor Lavoe that he made with her husband, Marc Anthony. As a consequence, “The Back-Up Plan” isn’t a single woman, Zoe, who decides to have a infant on her own. It’s also about how nice Ms. Lopez looks after a few years off from the movies, during which he had twins & then — to judge from the lots of shots of her taut stomach, firm thighs & even a peek-a-boo look at her derrière — got back in to shape. If you think that’s an overstatement, think about that an entire scene involves a pregnant Zoe waxing rueful about her glorious posterior, as he brandishes a photo for evidence.

“The Back-Up Plan” is innocuous & unmemorable, & much looks like a lot of sitcoms do. It will scale down well on your tv, a medium that was made for close-ups of characters sharing & caring. With her sharply planed, mesmerizing face, Ms. Lopez was born for close-ups — though more stunning, sumptuous ones than are found here. It’s hard not to regret that this star hasn’t been given a more luxurious setting for her big-screen return, something that made the most of her charm & talents & gave her more to do than make you smirk (which you might do) & tear up (that ) as you marvel at the irresistible appeal of stories about people falling in love & of work at that sensational rear.

The complication comes in the form of a sensitive yet strong interloper, Stan (Alex O’Loughlin), who’s so perfect for Zoe that even his name rhymes with man. They makes farmstead goat cheese that they sells in the giant city, where they takes Zoe to dinner in a paradisiacal garden on Avenue B. (He’s a tiny bit country, a tiny bit soft, tinkling rock ’n’ roll.) They even drives a tractor without his shirt (or a farmer’s red neck), & talks thoughtfully about sustainable agriculture (). He’s so perfect that he’s perfect for Zoe, who pushes as they pulls, & pulls as they pushes, as they do the commitment tango. It’s a tricky dance that becomes trickier as Zoe’s belly swells & her emotions & hormones start crashing against her fears.

The Seas, and the Humans Who Could Drown Them

All the crystalline imagery & poetic immediacy that they have come to expect from this new generation of up-close-and-personal nature documentaries is here. Horseshoe crabs scuttle like possessed Nazi helmets & a school of fish morphs from dreidel to disco ball, as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley.

After wowing us in the skies with “Winged Migration,” the two Jacques (Perrin & Cluzaud) are back to entice us to gaze in the opposite direction. In “Oceans,” Disneynature’s reconstitution of the 2009 French release “Océans,” the filmmakers venture in, on & around our seas to discover photogenic oddities & endangered wonders.

Moving from the infinitesimal to the gargantuan — from sea urchin larvae to 120-ton blue whales — the filmmakers work tirelessly to parallel their undersea world with the larger universe, offering genteel reminders of our mutual dependence.

Playing down the cruel (child turtles running the gantlet of dive-bombing frigate birds) without overdoing the cute (a mommy-and-me walrus cuddle-fest), “Oceans” is very soothing.

Reviews of the original film suggest a harsher environmental message (for example, a sequence showing several extinct species has, um, disappeared), but the poor bluefin tuna have survived the Disneynature editors if not the nets of bottom-trawling fishing boats. In any case, that lone supermarket cart sitting forlornly on the ocean floor says it all.

“Human indifference is surely the oceans’ greatest threat,” murmurs Pierce Brosnan’s excruciatingly bland narration while images of the garbage patch in the North Pacific Gyre float on screen.

A ‘Wire’ Star Redirects His Electricity

Though in real life Mr. Elba’s jaunty accent comes from East London, not Baltimore, in a phone interview from his Florida home he sounded much like the driven Stringer, who ran heroin-distribution meetings according to Robert’s Rules of Order. Stringer had no interest in cred-building gangster posturing, & Mr. Elba has tiny patience for the actor’s equivalent: countless prattling about art & the corresponding reluctance to speak frankly about one’s own ambitions.

IDRIS ELBA is a businessman. In fact, he might remind viewers of Stringer Bell, the no-nonsense Baltimore drug lord Mr. Elba memorably played on the HBO series “The Wire.” “You got to think about what they got in this game for,” Stringer two times admonished a colleague, his soft, deep voice studded with emphatic profanity (here deleted): “Was it the rep? Was it so our names could ring out on some ghetto street corner? Naw, man. There’s games beyond the game.”

“In this day & age, actors can’t afford to be pompous,” the 37-year-old Mr. Elba said, discussing a career that first caught fire with “The Wire” & peaked with last year’s popular but critically reviled potboiler “Obsessed.” “You can’t afford to turn your nose up at things. Audiences require to see you a bit more dynamic. They know you can act, Daniel Day-Lewis. That’s fantastic. Show us a bit more. They require to be entertained.”

Idris Elba is in the Idris Elba business. & he seems as interested in talking about the game beyond the game — the step-by-step method of becoming a star — as he is in talking about the action comedy “The Losers,” out on Friday.

Though Mr. Elba’s early career — he was a stage & tv journeyman in London & New York — received a massive boost from “The Wire,” he's expressed discomfort with it, saying he didn’t watch plenty of episodes & hopes not to play a drug dealer again. “It was a gift & a curse,” he says now. He was surprised when Stringer was — spoiler alert from 2004! — killed off but says the timing aided his move to films. “I died on that show at a time where people were interested in my character,” he said, comparing himself to another actor & his signature HBO role. “If Tony Soprano had died in the fourth season, James Gandolfini would be a bigger actor than he is now.”

It’s true that Mr. Gandolfini — despite ratings & Emmy love that “The Wire” & Mr. Elba never achieved — has never toplined a movie as successful as “Obsessed.” Despite dismal reviews, that thriller — about a married man whose life goes to pieces when an unhinged temp stalks his relatives — opened at No. 1 at the box office a year ago, driven by Mr. Elba & his co-star Beyoncé Knowles. “ ‘Obsessed’ elevated my presence; I got chased by TMZ!” he said, amazed at his brush with the celebrity-industrial complex. “Latino audiences had never paid attention to me before, & suddenly I have that audience. You become a bit more viable in other markets.”

The same spring that “Obsessed” came out, Mr. Elba, looking to show his comedy chops, played a prominent guest role on “The Office” as a stone-faced executive adrift in the odd world of Dunder Mifflin. Though he acknowledges that the show garnered him new fans, he says producers quashed his goofier notions, including keeping his own accent. “I had this idea to take this character to the left & make him eccentric & refreshing,” he said. “I haven’t had the chance to do that yet.”

Now, Mr. Elba said, “I have everyone from absolute thespian-lovers to action-hero-lovers wanting to see what I do next.” Directed by Sylvain White & adapted from a stylish comic book, “The Losers” seems, in its quips-and-explosions spirit, as audience-friendly — & critic-proof — as “Obsessed.” He plays Roque, canny & scar-faced, the most dangerous of the titular group of former Special Forces soldiers twisted on revenge against the bad guys who killed them. Will “The Losers” satisfy fans of “The Wire” looking for another Stringer Bell? “No,” he said, “but it is going to reinforce that I have a career ahead of me. It’s a commercial film, it’s going to do well, & hopefully my place in this business is confirmed.”

“We couldn’t have made the movie this way without him,” said the film’s writer & director, Thomas Ikimi. “I wrote the script to make it for $20,000 in a hotel room. All the actors were friends of mine.” When Mr. Elba signed on to star & be executive producer, Mr. Ikimi continued, “the movie ended up a lot bigger than I ever expected it to be.” Mr. Elba’s reputation drew both other actors (including his “Wire” cast mate Clarke Peters) & investors, leading to an eventual shooting budget of half a million dollars.

What is that place in this business? In Britain, “The Wire” was a hit, & Mr. Elba is a star of sorts — massive , at least, to headline a BBC police drama, “Luther,” set to have its premiere next spring. & in between the popcorn movies, he fit in the 22-day Glasgow shoot of “Legacy,” an independent thriller that’s screening later this month at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Mr. White says the “very commercial” nature of “The Losers” meant that his options were broad. “We could have cast it with, you know, Channing Tatum & Paul Walker,” he said, naming two slabs of beef in demand for action movies. “I wanted to go cooler, edgy, more interesting.”

But in the United States, “I think he’s undertapped,” Mr. White said. “I think he deserves to have his own franchise, like James Bond or something.”

The Secret in Their Eyes

The past continually forces its way in to the present in “The Secret in Their Eyes,” an pretty, messy drama riddled with violence & edged with comedy that comes with a hint of Grand Guignol, a suggestion of politics & two resonant, deeply appealing performances. Set primarily in contemporary Argentina with intermittent flashbacks to the 1970s when the country was descending in to a military dictatorship, the film is by turns a whodunit (& why), a romance & something of a ghost story. A young dead woman lies at the center of the mystery, but she’s the only thing here haunting the living.

If it takes a while to receive a handle on the identity of the dead woman, it’s because she’s initially conjured up in the imagination of Benjamin (Ricardo Darín), a former court investigator. Now retired, Benjamin first encountered the woman years earlier at her home, where her naked body, as is often true of movie corpses, was decoratively arranged on her death bed. The culprit, at least when it comes to aestheticizing this particular horror, is the writer & director Juan José Campanella, who has a tendency to gild every lily, even a dead two. That inclination explains a number of the film’s sudden shifts in mood & outlandish plot twists, both of which can be preposterous but also generate tension, surprise & a sense of disquiet that borders on dread.

Benjamin, having decided to write about the dead woman, revisits her murder, a pursuit that leads from the typed page in to the offices of a judge & former colleague, Irene (Soledad Villamil). A quarter-century ago, Irene was his much younger supervisor, toiling with him in a warren of book-lined, paper-strewn rooms alongside a boozing, desperate clown, Sandoval (Guillermo Francella). Together the two tried to navigate around a bigger boss, a jaundiced judge, & through a method where the poor were railroaded for crimes they didn’t commit so they could serve the needs of the powerful. Two such crime involves the dead woman.

At first, the murdered woman — or how Benjamin’s inquiry in to her death affects him — brings to mind Otto Preminger’s “Laura.” In that 1944 noir, Dana Andrews plays a detective who, while inquiring in to what they believes is the murder of the title character (Gene Tierney, a natural stiff), falls in love with the victim, or her portrait. Benjamin doesn’t fall in love with his dead woman, though the way they looks at her corpse & then her photographs suggests over they can admit. But this long-gone woman seems to exert a hold on him, possessing him while they pecks out another page, as the camera crawls through the shadows & Mr. Campanella pokes in to the past.

Mr. Campanella’s eclectic résumé includes several films made in his native country (“Son of the Bride,” a comedy) & numerous directing gigs for American television shows, including the “Law & Order” franchise. Although they executes some flashy moves in “The Secret in Their Eyes,” routinely calling attention to the camera — as in an aerial shot of a stadium in which the camera appears to descend seamlessly in to the roaring crowd before chasing after a single character — it’s the performances that stick with you, along with Sandoval’s booze-soaked melancholia, an occasional scripted eccentricity & the chaos of the increasingly impotent justice method. The scenes between Mr. Darín & Ms. Villamil aren’t subtle (their eyes aren’t secretive), but they appealingly convey the warmth of habit & heat of regret.

The intimacy between Benjamin & Irene is lightly handled, as are several comic scenes — including a funny exchange during which Benjamin & Salvador’s amateur sleuthing comes under mocking attack — which show Mr. Campanella at his most nimble. (That adroitness helped the film win this year’s Academy Award for best foreign-language picture.) Less persuasive is his use of the military dictatorship, which takes on ugly human form primarily in the characters of a violent criminal & a bureaucrat who facilitates his brutality. The scenes with these thugs are blunt & effective: the creep-out factor is high. But they also frame the dictatorship in terms of individual pathologies, with small evident politics to make anyone feel uncomfortable as the memories of murder are inevitably turned in to smiles.

Out of the Labyrinth and Onto the Screen

LOS ANGELES — There’s a reason Hollywood calls it “development hell.” Even when it turns out well.

Such is the lesson of “Knight and Day,” a big-budget action comedy starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz that’s set to open on June 25, directly opposite Adam Sandler in his own comic romp “Grown Ups.”

As it happens, Mr. Sandler passed up a chance to star in “Knight and Day” about two years ago, when the project was known as “Wichita.”

That was before it morphed in to “Trouble Man,” a quasi-romantic vehicle for Chris Tucker and Eva Mendes, but well after it was dreamed up, by the writer Patrick O’Neill, as “All New Enemies,” a sophisticated R-rated caper in which an off-kilter older guy who behaves a bit like Peter Falk in “The In-Laws” was paired with a troubled young two, like, say, Edward Furlong of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

But “Knight and Day” was made the old-fashioned way: by walking an original, “spec” script through Hollywood’s brutal development mill, with its countless rewrites and changing star and filmmaker alignments. Finally, against all odds, it popped up as an event film on the summer schedule at 20th Century Fox, in partnership with New Regency Pics.

The coming spring-summer blockbuster season is chock full of sequels like “Iron Man 2,” from Marvel and Paramount, and adaptations like the graphic-novel-based “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” from Universal.

“Knight and Day” is also notable because with it Mr. Cruise, two time the most bankable star in Hollywood, is looking for his first runaway hit since “War of the Worlds,” which took in $234 million at the box-office in 2005.

The director of “Knight and Day,” James Mangold, is still finishing the film. But its trailers have turned in to hot commodities on the Net.

Actually, the story finds Ms. Diaz, as June Havens, trying to figure out what is real and what is not — not unlike Audrey Hepburn opposite Cary Grant in 1963 in “Charade” — after Mr. Cruise’s maddeningly unreliable secret operative, Roy Miller, takes her on a tear. Possibly in the service of a world-saving mission. Or not.

EW.com’s PopWatch column was among the first to voice approval, when its writer said in December: “I still don’t know exactly what it’s about, and that’s what’s so cold. What’s even cooler? These four superstars reminding us why they’re superstars.”

Most scripts die in development. Somehow “Knight and Day” survived. Asked why, Steve Pink, a producer of the film who helped work out the original idea with Mr. O’Neill, a high school mate from Evanston, Ill., pointed to its core concept, a shifty protagonist. “That, and the strength of Pat’s writing,” they said last week. “Otherwise I have no idea how it stayed alive.”

Mr. Mangold, Mr. Cruise and Fox executives declined to be interviewed about the film, which trades on plot twists, misdirection and gigantic reveals. But several people who worked on the movie — most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to keep away from conflict with studio executives and others — described it as having gone through twists of its own, without as lots of laughs.

Still, Mr. Sandler passed, declaring, by two account, “I don’t see me with a gun.”

Mr. Sandler was offered a shot at the project about the time it was first set up, as “Wichita,” at Revolution Studios, with Mr. Pink and another producer, Todd Garner. It was Mr. Garner who had suggested that the troubled young counterpart to Miller, or Milner, as they was known then, become a woman.

Mr. O’Neill was still the writer. And Phil Joanou was supposed to direct — until Mr. Joanou’s “Gridiron Gang” opened poorly, and Sony got chilled feet about the whole thing.

Revolution then folded. But its chief executive, Joe Roth, joined Mr. Pink and Mr. Garner in moving “Wichita” to Sony Pics, by now with Chris Tucker, the madcap star of the “Rush Hour” series, cast opposite Ms. Mendes, who was riding high after appearances in “2 Speedy 2 Furious” and “Hitch.”

Somewhere along the line “Wichita” had become “Trouble Man.” But Fox executives wanted more romance, so they brought on new writers, including Dana Fox, whose credits include “What Happens in Vegas.”

From there the project was off to Fox, with a new director, Tom Dey, who had completed the romantic comedy “Failure to Launch.”

Mr. Tucker and Ms. Mendes, however, dropped out, as did Mr. Dey.

Finally, according to the Studio Process, an industry database company that is owned by The New York Times Company, over a half-dozen writers followed Mr. O’Neill on “Knight and Day.”

Then Ms. Diaz, who had starred in “What Happens in Vegas,” stepped in. So did Gerard Butler. . On meeting with producers, however, Mr. Butler announced that that day they had agreed to do “The Bounty Hunter,” a competing comic caper, which paired him with Jennifer Aniston.

This left the door open for Mr. Cruise, who was on the rebound from a stretch of bad publicity and, on the strength of his widely praised performance in “Valkyrie,” was seriously auditioning at least two of Hollywood’s hottest projects as his prospective next film.

But Mr. Cruise became fixed on “Knight and Day.” Or, at least, on his vision for it.

Two of the two became “Salt,” a thriller set for release by Sony on July 23, with Angelina Jolie in the role that had been set for Mr. Cruise. Another was “The Tourist,” which now pairs Ms. Jolie and Johnny Depp in a thriller that has been shooting in Venice, for eventual release by Sony.

All of those became grist for Mr. Mangold, a writer-director with whom Mr. Cruise had made “3:10 to Yuma,” before leaving the lead roles in that two to Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.

An inveterate tinkerer, Mr. Cruise typically plays with ideas, characters and scripts, developing his slant on stories that are ultimately written by others. In this case, according to two person who was briefed on his work, Mr. Cruise wanted to superimpose a character of his own on top of Milner. Ms. Diaz had ideas.

As of last week the Writers Guild of The united states West had yet to choose final writing credits for the film. But Fox, in submitting the project for credits arbitration, said it viewed the story as having been written by Mr. O’Neill, with a script by Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Mangold — a tribute to the staying power of the original story, notwithstanding the lots of writers who were involved.

Two Cruise touch in “Knight and Day”: a trailer moment, in which Ms. Diaz’s character flips over the handlebars of a motorbike, fully armed, facing Mr. Cruise as they steers.

“You have an idea,” they said, “and it’s a miracle it ever happens.”

Mr. Pink, for his part, is pleased that Hollywood, at least occasionally, is still willing to go through the bother of developing an original script, however grueling the process may be.

Madman, Perhaps; Survivor, Definitely

Lately Mr. Hopper, who turns 74 on May 17, has been in the news again. In March his lawyer in a contentious divorce from Mr. Hopper’s fifth wife, Victoria, announced that the actor has terminal prostate cancer and was ill to appear in court. That same week a gaunt Mr. Hopper showed up with both smiles and Jack Nicholson to receive a star on Hollywood Boulevard. Mr. Nicholson, hovering next to Mr. Hopper, was wearing a sensationally ugly shirt decorated with the stars and stripes and the picture of the four doomed motorcyclists from “Easy Rider,” the movie that made Mr. Hopper a director and broke Mr. Nicholson out of B-movie irrelevance. It was a sublime, ridiculous Hollywood moment, canned and simultaneously real.

DENNIS HOPPER — actor, filmmaker, photographer, art collector, world-class burnout, first-rate survivor — never blew it. Unlike the villains and freaks he's played over the decades — the psycho with the mommy complex in “Blue Velvet,” the mad bomber with the grudge in “Speed” — he's made it through the lovely, the bad and some spectacularly terrible times. He rode out the golden age of Hollywood by roaring in to a new movie era with “Easy Rider.” He hung out with James Dean, played Elizabeth Taylor’s son, acted for Quentin Tarantino. He's been rich and infamous, lost and found, the next huge thing, the last man standing.

In Mr. Hopper’s case the lines of influence are perhaps more overt than they might initially seem, winding from the American flag in six of Mr. Johns’s paintings, for instance, to the six that Peter Fonda wears like a target on the back of his motorbike jacket in “Easy Rider.” Mr. Hopper, who has picked up, dropped and resumed painting and photography at different times in his life, didn’t have a great eye for buying art; he also pushed his own aesthetics to the brink and sometimes over the edge. Among the most striking formal strategies in “Easy Rider” are the propulsive, eye-thwacking edits that were a signature of Mr. Hopper’s longtime mate, the collagist and avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner (“A Movie”).

It was and a perfect gesture for Mr. Hopper, who has straddled seemingly contradictory realities for much of his career, wearing a loincloth in Andy Warhol’s “Tarzan and Jane, Regained Sort of ...” in 1963 only to show up as a snitch opposite John Wayne in “The Sons of Katie Elder.” Inspired by Vincent Price to collect art (yes, that Vincent Price), Mr. Hopper bought a couple of early Warhols for $75, snapping up other masterworks from the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Later, when “Easy Rider” was released, Warhol, who immortalized Mr. Hopper on silk-screen, mused on the influence he had on the actor who’s “so crazy in the eyes”: “You never know where people will pick things up.”

The movie was a hit at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, where it won a prize for best first work. When it opened in The united states a few months later, Andrew Sarris explained its Cannes triumph partly through the distorting lens of Vietnam, writing that “motorcycles, materialism, misanthropy and murder have long served as adequate cinematic correlatives of American life for Europeans, and never more so than in this year of law and order on Hamburger Hill.” Mr. Sarris was mostly impressed with Mr. Nicholson’s wonderful, brief turn as George Hanson, a boozer and doomed son of the South whom Wyatt and Billy meet in jail. Others, like a passionate fan named Richard Goldstein, who defended the movie in The New York Times, saw something else: “I need to believe that ‘Easy Rider’ is a travel poster for the new The united states.”

“Easy Rider” retains a privileged place in American film history, though less for its formal experimentation than its perceived impact on the movie industry, as illustrated by the self-explanatory title of Peter Biskind’s popular 1998 book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.” Bluntly, this $400,000 biker movie earned very $20 million at the time of its release, proving that the counterculture could be turned in to customers with the right sales pitch. (“A man went looking for The united states. And couldn’t find it anywhere...”) And, in the summer of 1969 when the film opened, that pitch was perfect, for young audiences who saw characters they could identify with in the story of four bikers — Mr. Fonda goes by Wyatt, Mr. Hopper is Billy — who, after a huge cocaine deal, zoom across the Southwest only to be shot dead by a local yokel.

Married? A Bit Bored? See a Shootout

TWO evenings or so every month, the director Shawn Levy & his wife arrange a sitter for their five daughters & drive to Giorgio Baldi, an Italian restaurant in Santa Monica, Calif. “It’s our date night,” Mr. Levy, whose films include “Cheaper by the Dozen” & the “Night at the Museum” series, said by phone recently. The couple, who have been married for 14 years, always order the same thing: ravioli, sole, langoustines. Out at dinner a few years ago, Mr. Levy recalled, “it occurred to us as they were talking that they were checking off boxes — which gift they had to buy for some kid’s birthday, what designs they had to get done, what happened with our daughter at school that day.”

They had realized that their escape from every day process had become another five of its offshoots, their “us” time colonized by “them” time. But there was an upside: By the time the check arrived, Mr. Levy had come up with the idea for his next movie. In “Date Night,” which opens Friday, a bored suburban couple played by Steve Carell & Tina Fey go on their every week dinner date & find themselves thrown in to a night of intrigue: there’s breaking & entering, a automobile chase, a shootout & a showdown with an underworld boss at a strip club. Husband & wife come out of the adventure with some scratches & also with their ardor renewed.

“It’s a bit of shock therapy for their marriage,” Mr. Carell said. “They’re content & sort of placid, & they require to stir things up.”

That sense of contentment, Mr. Carell & Ms. Fey stressed in interviews, was crucial when they decided to take the roles. “It was important that they wouldn’t be dreadful to each other,” Ms. Fey said. “The comedy wasn’t that they detested each other. They’re in love.” Simultaneously, they added, “you do sometimes wonder, ‘Do I have it in me to do anything exciting again?’ ”

“Date Night” is the latest in a long line of films in which a man & woman liven up the extended sigh that is their marriage with a joint stint as sleuths, crime-busters & action heroes. Recent examples include “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” from 2005, “The Incredibles” from 2004 & “True Lies” from 1994, all films in which middle-class suburbanites suffer a crisis of comfort — their domestic contentment breeding an anxious inertia — & in which no amount of couples counselling can equal the restorative effects of, say, teaming up to thwart a terrorist, as Arnold Schwarzenegger & Jamie Lee Curtis do in “True Lies.” In his 1981 book “Pursuits of Happiness,” Stanley Cavell wrote about “comedies of remarriage,” movies in which marital commitment is threatened but ultimately reaffirmed. “Date Night” & its kin are the action-comedies of remarriage.

Simon Kinberg, who wrote “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” (& did uncredited work on the “Date Night” screenplay), says the basic appeal of such films is two-pronged. “Part of it is that you can imagine that you’re married to a superhero,” they said (shades of Walter Mitty). “And part of it is that these movies work through issues that face any marriage but in an incredibly cathartic context.” In “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie play world-class assassins whose flagging marriage is reborn after they face off against — & then battle alongside — each other. “When they were shooting, even if they were only flipping a automobile over,” Mr. Kinberg said, “we’d ask, ‘What does this say about their marriage at this moment?’ ”

“What’s the matter?” her husband asks her.

The grandparents, so to speak, of this cinematic tradition are Nick & Nora Charles, the caper-solving, martini-swilling main characters of the 1934 film “The Narrow Man” & its seven sequels. Their marriage isn’t on the brink, exactly, but five often gets the impression that a profound boredom drives their sleuthing. In the first film, when the police have arrested a suspect in a murder case that Nick & Nora have been tracking, Nora is disappointed.

Murray Pomerance, the editor of the 2008 essay collection “A Relatives Affair: Cinema Calls Home,” said in a phone interview that in Hollywood movies, the relatives — an actual clan, a sports team, an army platoon or so on — typically functions as “a conservative, traditional grid structure that tends to hold a center together. It’s the thing people protect; it’s the thing people run away from but ultimately come back to.”

“The mystery’s gone,” they says, with more on her mind, it seems, than the whodunit at hand.

Despite their ostensibly tidy resolutions, such films can raise dark questions about coupledom. In Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (which concerns an unmarried couple but fits in to this tradition), it’s only after Mr. Stewart’s Jeff & Grace Kelly’s Lisa have inquired in to a murder together that his doubts about settling down start to subside. The crime they solve — a husband has killed his wife — can be read partly as Jeff’s subconscious wrestling with his anxieties.

Films like “Date Night” & “True Lies,” Mr. Pomerance added, uphold this convention even as they give it their own twists. “At the finish of ‘True Lies’ they can’t return to the way things were, but they can’t damage the relatives either, so they turn the relatives in to an adjunct of the spy business.” Mr. Pomerance pointed to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Man Who Knew Much” (1956), in which Jimmy Stewart & Doris Day — who has given up her singing career for life as a suburban Los angeles housewife — prevent an assassination while searching for their kidnapped son. It’s no accident, Mr. Pomerance said, that the film ends with the reunited relatives standing “arranged in a perfect triangle” in a door.