Get Smart

“Get Smart”

USA. 2008. Directed by Peter Segal. Screenplay by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember. Based on characters created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. Starring: Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Arkin, Terrence Stamp, Terry Crews, David Koechner, James Caan, Bill Murray, Patrick Warburton, Masi Oka, Nate Torrence, Ken Davitian, David S. Lee and Dalip Singh.

Rating: ★★

Strange how Get Smart collects such an ideal cast and misuses it. Also peculiar how the film tries to be an action comedy but never really manages to get the action and the comedy right at the same time. On the surface, from the trailers, the players all certainly seem primed and ready to capture the spirit of the 60s spy spoof TV show. It is just that they are sadly shackled by a lugubrious screenplay that simply looked at the summer calendar and forgot to fill it with actual funny jokes.

What a bummer because Steve Carell is just about the perfect choice to play Maxwell Smart, the bumbling analyst turned agent originally played by Don Adams and created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. He works for a top, elite U.S. secret agency called CONTROL where he deciphers cryptic information from the evil terrorist organization called KAOS. He, however, wants to rise above being just an analyst and become a field agent. The Chief (Alan Arkin) has doubts and believes Smart’s talents lie strictly with intelligence. Plans change though when The Chief learns that all his agents have been compromised and must hire Smart to become the new Agent 86 and save the day.

As fans of the TV show know, the comical appeal was seeing a bumbling guy who is a little too cock-sure to realize that he does not quite have the chops to be an agent like his knockout partner, Agent 99 (played originally by Barbara Feldon and here by Anne Hathaway), who occasionally has to bail him out. The miscalculation of the screenplay by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember is quickly losing that potential of seeing Smart survive almost purely by luck and turning Smart into a skilled agent practically overnight. Sure, there are a few initial bumbles along the way as in that largely seen trailer clip when Smart misses crashing into a window and says, “Missed it by that much” or when he inadvertently causes a curtain of beads to fall apart and somehow makes a crony trip over them later. But why hire Carell to carry the movie when his deadpan comedic talent is not fully utilized and the actor himself will be replaced by stuntmen and green screen to fall from dizzying heights or perform acrobatic moves?

The director, Peter Segal handles all the stunts and action sequences quite well from a technical standpoint, of course, and after making a few lighthearted, successful comedies like 50 First Dates and several inane ones like The Longest Yard and Tommy Boy, I guess this may be his calling card for making more summer action thrillers. But I am not sure that a summer thriller with much too prolonged “serious” action sequences is what Get Smart should be. Maybe the director and the writers guessed (probably correctly) that most of the audience don’t recall the original show but for those like me who have seen the show or any other Mel Brooks spoof, are we to be satisfied merely with just a handful of split-second sight gags tucked in here and there? Perhaps I should not have expected so much considering Segal is working from a screenplay from the writers of the Matthew McConnaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedy bomb, Failure to Launch.

Also, as Segal’s previous lame comedies have shown, what he still sorely lacks is a sense of timing to actually make the slapstick violence on display funny, thus failing to fully graft the comedy into the action. A scene, for example, when The Chief gets clocked in the head by Smart with a fire extinguisher comes off as more excruciating than funny because it lingers more on the brutal physicality of the violence than on the latter’s actual blundering comical reaction. And a later joke in a dizzying fight atop an SUV in the climactic action sequence is rendered unfunny simply because it removes the element of surprise by needlessly flashing back to its setup and not trusting the audience will instantly get it when they see it.

The brightest spot is the choice of casting, particularly Alan Arkin as The Chief, who spells out his agency’s rivalry with the CIA in one humorous line when he claims that Agent 23 (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) jamming a stapler into a man’s forehead is CIA practice. Johnson himself is an inspired choice to play Agent 23 as the by-the-books operative who is maladjusted to office life and Hathaway shows a flash of depth when she explains how she became the beautiful agent she is. But every actor, including Terrence Stamp as KAOS’ head villain, Siegfried, seems to just get his or her one scene and then turn into yet another stock character, particularly Hathaway who is ultimately relegated to just another damsel in distress. And the less said about James Caan in a lazy, supremely dull take-off of George Bush as The President, the better (partly because that cheap gag with him in a children’s classroom tilts the terrorist plot into an unnecessary, distant echo of 9/11).

In the end, I guess the summer release date should have been a warning sign for this bombastic adaptation of Get Smart. A June release most often means the screen will be filled with a plethora of mindless clocks, bangs, booms and pows. Unfortunately, the mindless clocks, bangs, booms, and pows alone can never really generate comedy and that is not the treatment Get Smart and its comically talented cast deserves.