Based on the spy spoof television series from the 1960s, Get Smart stars Steve Carell as intelligence analyst turned field agent Maxwell Smart.
More Brooke Bond than James Bond, he teams up with the imminently more capable and beautiful Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) to bring down a deadly terrorist organisation known as 'KAOS'.
Being as it was not exactly a stonking TV hit outside the US (even in its sixties heyday) is Get Smart just too riskier a choice for the big screen treatment?
They say:
Rolling Stone: “Carell wins on a rocksolid technicality – he's funny.”
MTV: “A piffling summer diversion.”
TIME Magazine: “Desperately looking for deadpan jokes in all the wrong places.”
We say:
"We have what we want, why blow up the building?" utters one of Terrance Stamp's henchmen as they steal a batch of uranium. For a big explosion, obviously! Although an original joke might have been better.
This is the main problem with amiable comedy action thriller Get Smart. It gets too distracted by the whizz bang, when it’s far more effective at the chuckles. The gags are not new, some are desperately old and crass, but they're funny.
Carell is a nimble comic performer, whether climbing rope in a fat suit or impersonating a Russian goat herder, while Alan Arkin is even livelier as his elderly boss with anger management issues. They work effortlessly alongside the support too (Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is surprisingly tolerable), knocking each other out with fire extinguishers, stapling memos to foreheads, all the usual spy stuff.
Anne Hathaway plays the straightest part, quite possibly well, we are not entirely sure. She is so incapacitatingly sexy we lost concentration during several of her scenes. There's a moment with a ripped cocktail dress and some laser beams that should be banned for what it does to your imagination in a public place. Her relationship with Carell's Max is cute and their age difference is ably explained via the phrase 'dusty old uterus' and Hathaway looking horrified.
Get Smart lames out because it riffs on everything and contributes nothing to an already saturated genre. During a less than inventive getaway, Max plunges out of a plane with no parachute only to be snared by skydiving Agent 99 a few seconds later.
This is a backwards nod to seventies Bond caper Moonraker, which have might been more effective if we hadn't already seen a similar idea in Point Break and Eraser. Despite the presence of a Jaws like assassin tumbling after them, director Peter Segal's 'homage' is not fooling anybody. The same applies to his True Lies’ tango rip off - it was only fourteen years ago, buddy, we can remember.
Why then don’t Hollywood’s geniuses dream up something new? For the same reason they have just made a sequel to The Scorpion King, because proven tosh is safer than innovation. However, for laid back secret agent japes (and Hathaway’s endless pins), this is sometimes all you want. It can be comforting to know what you're going to get, even if you’ve had it several times before.
With not one but two toilet gags, it's clear that crap humour will always be funny, so long as it's squeezed out by the right people and with enough enthusiasm. Glaze over the excessive knockabout stunts and incendiaries and Get Smart proves itself a likable jaunt, even finding room for a hilarious Bill Murray cameo.
If this pic was made twenty years ago, Murray would have been Maxwell Smart, and because the essence of his and Carrell's comedy is so similar, it’d be the same deal.
Fundamentally this is a compliment, as nostalgia is the movie's biggest ally. It's about as radical as filming someone slipping on a banana skin, though thankfully just as amusing.
CAST
Steve Carell
Anne Hathaway
Dwayne Johnson
Alan Arkin
DIRECTOR
Peter Segal
TIME
110 mins
POSTED...
Mon 25 Aug at 12:01pm
