Film review: 'Get Smart' gets dumb
Laughs are missing in secret-agent comedy based on '60s TV series
Missed it by that much.
When secret agent Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) uttered that catch phrase on the much-admired spy-spoof sitcom of the 1960s, "Get Smart," he usually was referencing a thrown knife, tossed bomb or falling object that had missed its target by inches.
Tracy Bennett/Warner Bros. Pictures
Heads up! Would you believe Anne Hathaway as Agent 99 and Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart in the roles made famous by Don Adams and Barbara Feldon in "Get Smart"?
Rated PG-13 for some rude humor, action violence and language
Length: 110 minutes
Released: June 20, 2008 NationwideScore: 3.0
Cast: Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Arkin, Terence Stamp
Director: Peter SegalProducer: Andrew Lazar, Chuck Roven, Alex Gartner
Writer: Tom J. Astle, Matt Ember
Genre: Action/Adventure, Comedy
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
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The 110 minutes of the new feature-film update of "Get Smart" may contain more gunshots and explosions than all five seasons of the TV series, but it typically misses its target -- the funny bone -- by such a wide margin that we might credit shrapnel rather than the aim of the director or screenwriters when the rare hit is achieved.
With Steve Carell as Smart, Anne Hathaway as his CONTROL colleague Agent 99 and Alan Arkin as "The Chief," the film is about as perfectly cast as an almost 40-years-later update could be (the original "Get Smart" ended its run in 1970). But it's a movie without a context, as useless as a shoe phone in an iPhone era. (So was "The Nude Bomb," an ill-fated 1980 theatrical update with Adams as Smart and Sylvia "Emmanuelle" Kristel as Agent 34. See for yourself: The movie made its DVD debut this week from Universal Studios Home Entertainment.)
The original series -- created by the comedy-genius team of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry -- was a response to the Cold War-inspired James Bond craze that already had given birth to such copycats as "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." (which debuted on NBC a year before "Get Smart"). Perhaps motivated by the famous but unseen pie fight-in-the-War Room sequence that Kubrick cut from the climax of "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), "Get Smart" transformed international intrigue and anti-Communist paranoia into the stuff of pratfalls and one-liners. The program recognized the nerve-wracking absurdity of trusting the world's safety to the gadgetry and trickery of competing nuclear superpowers; it reminded us that our weaponry (like Max's shoe phone) was only as reliable as the people in charge of it.
The new "Get Smart" casts James Caan as a dimwitted George W. Bush clone and tosses off a couple of Homeland Security jokes, but the film -- like the embattled CONTROL agency of its storyline -- is hampered by irrelevance. (The "Austin Powers" movies embraced this potential problem by thawing the title spy from a 1960s deep freeze, making him a comic anachronism.)
Worse, "Get Smart" may be the year's murkiest, most unattractive movie. Peter Segal ("Nutty Professor II: The Klumps") directs as if he were shooting a "Bourne" sequel, replacing the colorful Pop sheen of the series with the dull gray of the plot's post-Soviet Russian setting, and staging the action with an anti-humor shaky-camera "realism" (there's more chaos than KAOS). All this might not matter if the jokes and situations were consistently funny or even original, but they're not; at one point, Segal even puts Carrel in a fat suit, as if he'd rather be making "Nutty Professor III."
The tired script and ugly visuals waste the talents of Carell and Hathaway, who make a good team in what is essentially an "origin story" that depicts Smart's rise from a low-level CONTROL techie to the agency's new star, Agent 86. The supporting cast includes scene-stealing Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and second-banana comedy VIP David Koechner, but Bill Murray and Patrick Warburton are the funniest characters in the movie, perhaps because they're onscreen only for seconds, which doesn't give the filmmakers enough time to dilute their impact.
-- John Beifuss: 529-2394
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