Get Smart (Peter Segal, 2008): USA

Reviewed by Richard Feilden.  Viewed at Chapman University open air screening.

I have a problem.  I am torn.  Not over my feelings about the film.  Oh no, my quandary concerns my pun.  Get Smart Needs to Get Smarter?  Get Smart Got Dumber?  Back to School for Get Smart?  The options go on and on…  If only the jokes in the film had been so numerous.

Steve Carell is Maxwell Smart, a talented, if somewhat overzealous, analyst for the top secret CONTROL, the government agency established to counter KAOS, an international crime syndicate.  When KAOS infiltrates CONTROL and wipes out most of the field agents, Maxwell receives the promotion he has been longing for and, along with partner Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) he sets out to thwart the threat of nuclear armageddon and uncover the double agent in their midst…

The main problem with the film is the fantastically small number of jokes that are stretched out and repeated in an attempt to fill up the nearly two hour running time.  Maxwell used to be fat, but now he isn’t.  Maxwell loves tedious detail to the point of insanity.  Maxwell is incompetent when it comes to using his high-tech gadgets.  Throw in a ‘Jaws’ (as in James Bond, not the shark) lookalike and you have the film.  Really, that is pretty much it.   Rinse, repeat and hope it is funny the next time around.

Carell does his best and comes across as an affable fool, but when your character’s defining attribute is that he is dull, you don’t have a lot to play with.  Anne Hathaway plays it straight to good effect and even Dwayne Johnson hits the right notes.  But they just don’t have anything to really work with here, let alone poor Alan Arkin playing the agency chief.  And if you manage to get Bill Murray in your film, please do more than stuff him in a fake tree for 30 seconds of screen time.  And I know I shouldn’t bemoan the lack of character depth in this one note film, but if you are going to have a double agent (and given the number of people we are introduced to in the film the double agent isn’t exactly hard to spot…) then at least give them a reason to have turned!  By the time that the inevitable flashy, explosion-filled finale drags itself onto the screen, you just get the feeling that the film hasn’t earned it.

Get Smart isn’t as over the top as the early Austin Powers movies were, and even if some of the jokes fall flat, the machine gun pace at which they are launched at the screen ensures that you are never bored. It is only fractionally more camp that the Roger Moore era Bond that it seems to take most of its inspiration from.  Sad to say that the only way to Get Smart is to stay away.

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Published:
09.25.08 / 10am
Category:
Films