Somewhat surprisingly, I did not have any problems sitting through a screening of Get Smart. I’d heard rumors of trouble in regards to this theatrical updating of the popular 1960’s television spy spoof created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry (and starring Don Adams and Barbara Feldon), but for the life of me I couldn’t find remnants of them in the movie itself. For the most part, this Steve Carrell/Anne Hathaway vehicle was a relatively smooth ride, and those looking for a catastrophe aren’t going to find it here.

Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway in Warner Bros' Get Smart

Granted, what they’re also not going to find is 90-plus minutes of reasons to warrant buying a ticket and seeing the Peter Segal (50 First Dates) directed picture in theaters. While I could imagine the film making for a decent rental or a perfectly acceptable late night cable diversion, plunking down any hard-earned dollars in a venue that also requires you to pay through the nose for popcorn and drinks is not worth doing. You just shouldn’t do it, and while I can’t work up much enthusiasm for the movie one way or the other I got to see it for free so all I lost watching it was time; something tells me the majority of you out there reading this can’t say the same thing.

The storyline has been slightly updated to the modern age, but the good guys of CONTROL (led by a very game Alan Arkin) are still battling the forces of KAOS (fronted by an extremely bored Terrence Stamp). More, they’re still obsessed with Russians, this time Agent 99 (a ravishing, if underutilized, Hathaway) and newly minted Agent 86 Maxwell Smart (Carrell) heading to abroad to unravel a Yellow Cake uranium heist which could spell doom for the lame duck (and slightly illiterate) U.S. President (James Caan).

No offense but, the Russians? Really? That’s the best writers Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember (Failure to Launch) could come up with? With all that’s going on in the world today the go-to place for comedic villainy the funniest thing these two could come up with is a Cold War milieu so cliché I just started yawning thinking about it. I mean, political correctness is one thing but this is supposed to be a spoof. It seems to me that if any venue was ripe for a little sarcasm and satire then maybe this one is it.

This major handicap aside, Get Smart is, at times, actually pretty darn funny. Carrell slips right into Maxwell Smart as if he were born to do so, all of his quips, one-liners, supercilious sideways glances and dryly sardonic line readings just about as perfect as anything the actor has ever done. He is the one thig about the project that is absolutely perfect, and by the time it was over the only reason I was still smiling had everything to do with him. (Incidentally, he gets a major assist from Dwayne Johnson, the lithe and limber action star once again showcasing a skill for comedy someone really needs to utilize.)

Still, this is pretty slight stuff. More, for a movie that barely runs an hour and a half there are times it severely drags, the period between a rousing rooftop showdown on a burning bakery to the point where the third act climax takes off like a runaway freight train as lazily paced as anything I’ve seen this year. Worst of all, Agent 99 is just a shell of the fiery figure of intelligently sexy feminine empowerment she was on the old television show, the writers sadly turning her into a woman in distress seemingly every few seconds.

Be that as it may, I did laugh, and if I didn’t admit to that fact then I probably wouldn’t be a very good film critic. This is the kind of slapdash comedy where the jokes that hit (barely) outnumber the misses, and anytime that ratio tilts towards the side of scale tickling the funny bone then a partial sigh of moderate recommendation must be made.  

But I’d be lying just as strongly if I claimed the movie works as a whole or warrants being seen in a theater. Heck, to steal a line one or two of you out there might have heard a couple of times before, it could even be said that Get Smart, for all of Carrell’s valiant efforts, misses being a comedy gold mine by t-h-a-t much.

Film Rating: êê1/2  (out of 4)

Additional Links

-  Get Smart Theatrical Trailer