If you attend the latest exploitation of baby boomer TV nostalgia, “Get Smart,” don’t worry. You’ll stay smart — well, smart enough — because this big-screen adaptation of the 1960s series isn’t nearly as dumb as such predecessor bombs of similar origins as “The Flintstones,” “Bewitched,” “Lost in Space” and last month’s “Speed Racer.”
It’s not much of an endorsement to say that today’s spy-world action-comedy isn’t that bad. But expectations were very low given the potential for cheap gags from the slapstick element of the otherwise wry source television show and given headliner Steve Carell’s sophomoric tendencies as a leading man in previous feature film farces. (Remember “Evan Almighty”? Or, rather, don’t.)
How could you improve on material perfectly timed for its era and created by legendary comic geniuses Mel Brooks and Buck Henry? In the old Cold War espionage spoof that ran from 1965 to 1970, Don Adams famously chatted into his shoe phone and thwarted the evil counterspies of KAOS in full pratfall playing Control’s oblivious secret agent man Maxwell Smart. (KAOS was a blundering version of the Soviet’s KGB; Control was our CIA.)
Modernizing the time setting but — regrettably — not the resonant geopolitical context of the original, director Peter Segal and screenwriters Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember pay homage by including the series’ famous opening sequence and theme music, its main characters, and its stock phrases “missed it by that much” and “would you believe…”
The filmmakers then update the proceedings for contemporary (read: less demanding) multiplex audiences. They eliminate the socially/culturally pertinent wit, juice up the more accessible physical clowning and put-down banter, and emphasize elaborate action-oriented set pieces. Expensive production values and the addition of the macho Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (playing Control’s Agent 23) see to that.
Now transformed into another easy-to-swallow, postmillennial genre piece, effectiveness depends on the production’s snappy pace and congenial cast. Story and plot become nearly irrelevant. To wit: Klutzy good guy Maxwell Smart (a sympathetic Carell), his more skilled love interest Agent 99 (played by cute clotheshorse Anne Hathaway) and his employer Chief (Alan Arkin) oppose the KAOS bad guys including Siegfried (Terence Stamp), Siegfried’s second banana Shtarker (“Borat’s” Ken Davitian) and a mystery mastermind.
So, can this one wait to be seen in Blu-ray on your new home flat screen? Would you believe … yes?
“Get Smart”
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