Get Smart
'Get Smart' is fun, but lacks zany intelligence of TV series
Missed it by that much.
Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, creators of the original "Get Smart" TV show back in 1965, are credited as consultants on the new blockbuster film of the same name. The producers should have handed them the script. "Get Smart," version 2008, surrounds skilled, likable players, and a handful of solid belly laughs with $80 million worth of formulaic summer-movie mediocrity. A lot of things explode, but the movie never detonates.
That may be because the original show made rude fun of spy-movie cliches, whereas director Peter Segal ("50 First Dates," "Anger Management") just caves in to them. The new Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) may be a boob, but in the clutch he's a standard action hero with comic trimmings. The movie lacks the courage to make Max a genuine idiot; it also lacks the late Don Adams, who had the unique ability to make snippy cluelessness funny.
"Get Smart" does have Anne Hathaway, whose elegant visual lines and cool way with a retort as Agent 99 bear comparison with the show's Barbara Feldon. Better, it has Alan Arkin as the chief of top-secret spy organization CONTROL, updating Ed Platt's original with dry belligerence. Arkin, who gets off the movie's single funniest line (it involves a swordfish) continues his post-"Little Miss Sunshine" late-career roll; simply put, every summer tent pole should have him.
The problem is the script by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember ("Failure to Launch"), which mistakes boilerplate pee-pee jokes for the enthusiastic toilet humor that was Brooks's later specialty. (When in doubt, someone here always seems to get a paintball to the crotch.) Another offender is Richard Pearson's stop-and-start editing, consistently halting the comic momentum before it can build to real lunacy. The calculus for each scene is unwavering - TV show reference, slam-bang action, wisecrack - and it wears thin fast.
To his credit, Carell doesn't go for a Don Adams impression. His Maxwell Smart is more unlucky than bumbling, a former fatty who just wants to be the best field agent in the bureau, and damned if that miniature crossbow doesn't keep firing into his face.
That said, the movie errs by turning Max into a figure of hangdog sympathy: The 40 Year Old Virgin with a shoe phone. What's missing is the fatuousness that made Adams's original so oddly endearing and that was mined more successfully by Rowan Atkinson in the sloppier (and funnier) "Johnny English." The joke of the character is that no one takes Max seriously but himself.
But "Get Smart" takes everything a little too seriously, including the warmed-over plot about criminal KAOS mastermind Siegfried (Terence Stamp, looking mortified) planning to blow up Los Angeles with hijacked Chechnya nukes. (The TV series' Siegfried, Bernie Kopell, gets a cameo in the film.)
Do we really need revelations of double agents and a heroic, high-speed freeway fistfight over a briefcase containing nuclear stop-codes? Much more satisfying is the earlier scene in which Max and 99 infiltrate a Russian soiree seeking information: Carell's tango with the hefty Lindsay Hollister recalls the dance of the hippos in "Fantasia," and there's a bit with laser beams that feels like a blast of authentically vulgar Mel Brooks shtick.
"Get Smart" does pause for all the beloved catchphrases and set pieces. The Cone of Silence gets a clever update, and David Koechner turns fellow agent Larrabee into an amusing doofus; there's a glimpse of Hymie the Robot (Patrick Warburton) and a wonderful, all-too-brief scene featuring lonesome Bill Murray as Agent 13, forever stuck in that tree costume.
Just as many good actors are hung out to dry, though, including Dwayne Johnson (per the credits, no longer The Rock) as the smoothly capable Agent 23, James Caan as a US president who's a bigger idiot than Max, and Ken Davitian - Borat's portly foil - as Siegfried's henchman.
Hathaway is game but misused, too, for the simple reason that the unspoken romantic tension that kept the TV series purring for so long is addressed too quickly here. Max sees 99, gets a crush, game over. "Get Smart" the show jumped the shark when Max and 99 got married in the fourth season. Would you believe the movie doesn't make it to the second hour?
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/movienation.
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