Get Smart
Review by Todd Hertz | posted 6/20/2008
 1 of 3
Get Smart seemingly does several things right in remaking the quirky spy parody created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. First, it involves Brooks and Henry in some capacity as consultants. Second, it features near-perfect casting with Steve Carell as CONTROL agent Maxwell Smart, Anne Hathaway as Agent 99, and Alan Arkin as their Chief. And thirdly, it largely captures the spirit of the original while paying homage.
However, the film still can't overcome its biggest hurdle: Get Smart is just not funny.
Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart
Sure, it has a few funny moments, but you've already seen them in the commercials. Almost all of the rest of the jokes fall embarrassingly flat—like an odd, forced line about milking spiders (??) and really stale political satire. But unfunny attempts are not as much of the problem as is how seldom the movie even tries to be funny. Frankly, I was shocked by how few gags are in the movie. In fact, when the film does detour from the hum-drum spy-thriller plot or sappy down-on-his-luck hero montages, the comedy bits feel out-of-place, forced and rushed. Few bits are given a chance to patiently build to a payoff like the old show was known for. For instance, there is a sequence that seems to be setting up a gag about how assassinated agents keep dying face-first into their food—but after it happens just twice, the joke moves on to something else.
Carell told Entertainment Weekly that he agreed to the movie when it was pitched to him as "a comedic Bourne Identity." That sounds great. The trouble is that Get Smart isn't so much an integration of two genres, as it is a tug of war between them. In the end, neither genre fully works.
Anne Hathaway as Agent 99
If the film had a strong spy-thriller plot, a dip in the TV show's consistent goofiness, sly satire and wordplay could be forgiven. But the writing is pretty poor—as is the plot itself. In fact, the screenplay is basically a mash-up of the original Austin Powers with Rowan Atkinson's Johnny English. When all of CONTROL's field agents are compromised by the dangerous KAOS, their hopes depend on sending longtime intelligence man Maxwell Smart into the field. He must discover what KAOS head Siegfried is up to. And what is he up to? Holding the United States ransom with nuclear weapons, of course.
Seriously, the screenwriters couldn't come up with anything else for KAOS to be doing than threatening nuclear war? Really? Even the very poor 1980 Get Smart movie, The Nude Bomb, and the show's 1989 TV movie came up with more original and fun plots than that! (The movies dealt with, respectively, a bomb that destroyed only clothing to give KAOS a monopoly on clothes manufacturing and a weather machine used by a mad publisher to make citizens stay indoors and read.)
This maddening lack of creativity makes me think that the whole film was slapped together by the studio to make money with little care or inspiration. The flaws also cause one to wonder how much Mel Brooks and Buck Henry were really involved. This film is not the spy satire they created—built solely on the dopey incompetence and awkwardness of their lead—but a second-rate spy movie with some half-hearted attempts at humor.
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