Get Smart

If it’s the destiny of every fondly remembered US TV show to come around again in big screen format, then Steve Carell is going to be a busy man. He’s a natural stand in for Don Adams’s bumbling agent Maxwell Smart, just as he was for Paul Lynde as Uncle Fester in Bewitched. I’ll be he could fit into almost any 60s TV show without straining a muscle.

Get Smart has already inspired a couple of movies, The Nude Bomb in 1980, and a TV movie, Get Smart, Again! in 1989 – both with Adams, and best forgotten, apparently.

The show itself dates way back to 1965, the brainchild of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, who between them would give us Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, The Graduate and To Die For. Smart was a kind of anti-James Bond, a nincompoop oblivious to his own failings.

From the title sequence onwards, it’s clear that the filmmakers mean to stay in the spirit of the original’s silly, quickfire gags, non-sequiturs and slapstick. But some things have changed.

Max himself is still naïve and accident-prone (an intelligence analyst, he is promoted to field work after Control’s best agents are compromised by Kaos), but he can also surprise us with his ingenuity and expertise, even his physical prowess. Somewhere along the line Get Smart got smarter.

Presumably this more heroic spin is intended to put some clear blue water between Agent 86 and Mike Myers’ Austen Powers. Not that it would be difficult to pick either of them out of a line-up. Powers is the swingin’ lovechild of Sean Connery and Peter Sellers, whereas Smart is a far more prosaic American composite: a bit of Jack Benny’s smug complacency; the clipped, businesslike manner of Jack Webb from Dragnet; and perhaps a smidge of Lou Costello’s propensity for embarrassing situations.

Carell doesn’t imitate Adams’ sidelong diction either. The old catchphrases are there, but you might easily miss them – “by that much”. He hits his groove in a handful of slapstick sequences: a surprisingly graceful mambo with a large Russian woman, and a rather belated parody of Catherine Zeta-Jones’s laser-evasion gymnastics in Entrapment (with the addition of a rodent down his trousers).

As Agent 99, Smart’s better half, Anne Hathaway rolls her eyes a lot. She resembles Barbara Feldon – for a while she even sports a Feldon bob and an elegant evening gown – but with a modern twist. She’s a spikier customer than the old 99, less tolerant of Max’s screw-ups. Hathaway gets to show brains and beauty and a mean karate kick, but she’s essentially playing the straight man, which, uh, she carries off amazingly well, considering.

Plotting comes in a distant second to setting up the jokes. Screenwriters Tom Astle and Matt Ember barely bother to link them – maybe that’s why chief bad guy Terrence Stamp barely bothers to act? It’s not as easy to sustain this nonsense for 110 minutes as it is in 25-minute TV show, but at least you know there is always another gag on its way, and Segal (a veteran of three Adam Sandler movies) throws together a surprisingly decent action climax.

If the Russian heavies seem like a throwback to the Cold War (and hopefully not a sign of things to come), it’s also notable that the movie boasts both the Disney Concert Hall in LA and Moscow’s Red Square among its locations. There’s also some pretty lame satire of the US administration (and President Jimmy Caan).

Get Smart is lightweight and forgettable, but it’s also quite enjoyable.

Tom Charity
tom.charty@lovefilm.com

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