CONTROL analyst Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) gets a chance to finally be an agent, teaming up with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) to go after agents of Kaos, whose evil plot involves detonating a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles.

CRITIQUE

GET SMART is based on the TV series of the same name, a series that somehow managed to capture the perfect jokey tone to make the often-silly material work.  But the movie is much more of a mixed bag; though there are a few funny scenes here, there are a lot of attempts at comedy which fall flat, while the filmmakers also include a lot of shoot-outs and action scenes that add to the uneven tone.  The result is good enough to merit a rental, though one is left feeling that it could have been a lot better.

The inspired touch here should have casting Steve Carell to play Maxwell Smart; he would seem to have the right clumsy, stiff likability to make the part work.  But the problem here is that there just isn’t much new to the role; it feels like an offshoot of a lot of the parts that Carell as played before, and there really isn’t any sense that he is stretching himself here.

Faring better is Anne Hathaway as Agent 99, who does a good job with the part.  But she and Carell struggle to find real chemistry, while the script isn’t consistently-clever enough to make their underwritten characters really work. 

The plot is basically a mess, somehow managing to be very simple and yet always feeling muddled, basically just an excuse to have the main characters going from location to location.  Some of the sequences are well-done, like a skydiving bit in which they tussle with a Kaos agent; other sequences, like Smart dancing with an overweight woman, just don’t have any real point to them, or provide any real laughs.

Director Peter Segal generally does a good job with the action scenes, where a lot of the budget obviously went; bullets fly, things blow up, and a long chase scene at the end is solid enough.  But the humor is all over the map, and too often goes for too-easy gags.  By the end, this is never all that dull, but it also lacks a lot of particularly inspired sequences or a lot of laugh-out-loud moments.

THE VIDEO

Get Smart is presented in a matted widescreen format, preserving the aspect ratio of its original theatrical release, enhanced for widescreen TVs.  The picture quality is fine throughout.

THE AUDIO

Get Smart is presented in English 5.1, French 5.1 and Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround.  Dialogue, music and sound effects come through clear.  There are English, Spanish and French subtitles.

THE EXTRAS

There is an Alternate Version of the film in which you can see deleted scenes and alternate takes of scenes played in the context of the movie.  But the movie isn’t really good enough to merit sitting through a second time just for some jokes that weren’t good enough to make the theatrical cut, while these are the kind of things that work better just cut into a deleted-scenes reel.

The Right Agent For The Right Job is a fairly standard 10-minute promotional behind-the-scenes featurette, with interviews with the cast and crew intercut with a lot of footage from the movie.

Max is Moscow? is a 6-minute piece about location shooting in Russia.

Language Lessons is a quickly-tedious 3-minute bit in which Carell pretends to be talking foreign languages.

Spy Confidential is a 6–minute Gag Reel of actors blowing lines and laughing that has some amusing moments.

There is also a Digital Copy of the movie.

FINAL THOUGHT

There are some laughs here, though it could have worked a lot better.