Rather than breathe a sigh of relief that scheduling conflicts kept her out of the execrable Mr. & Mrs. Smith, lovely Nicole Kidman has nevertheless tracked down Simon Kinberg, the writer of that glossy garbage (as well as the ingeniously terrible XXX: State of the Union).
The pair is teaming for an as-yet-untitled Fox spy thriller that will apparently be “in the vein of The Bourne Identity but with a female protagonist”, even though Shane Black already did the exact same thing a decade ago with The Long Kiss Goodnight.
Kinberg will likely just be recycling whatever flimsy ideas he had for the potential third XXX movie, which supposedly would’ve had an EXTREME female agent replacing Mr. Cube if the "franchise" had been viable. But with Bewitched, The Interpreter and The Stepford Wives on her recent filmography, Kidman doesn’t seem exceptionally concerned with the quality of her scripts these days anyway.
Y’know, like a lot of writers I’ve met who have somewhat sketchy official filmographies (hey, John Rogers!), Kinberg is probably a swell cat whose actual talent levels could only be seen in his unproduced and uncredited work. Then again (and judging solely by his commentaries on the Mr. & Mrs. Smith and XXX: State of the Union DVDs), maybe he’s just a fortunate hack who is convinced his material is more remarkable than it really is. Either way, my advice would be to keep this new script away from Doug Liman and Lee Tamahori.