DVD: Get Smart

Obtain Intelligence...

It is entirely possible that significant portions of the story and aspects of the humor on which the 2008 remake of Get Smart relies could be referential to the original TV show. I would certainly hope so, because I would like to imagine that someone out there thought this movie was funnier than I did. This movie is kind of funny, but it's really just the kind of laughs you get out of an open mic night at a comedy club. Sure, there are some solid laughs here and there, but half of them are softened by having seen them eighty times in the trailer and the other half are scarce. The only really good laughs are when Steve Carrell really brings it, but he doesn't much. It's not one of those "all the funniest parts are in the trailer" movies, but it's close.

As I said, I don't know much about the TV series, but from what I gather from my wealth of sources (see: Wikipedia), Maxwell Smart (orig. Don Adams), the semi-eponymous character, is a rather awkward secret agent, sort of like James Bond/Me-flirting-with-women (well, maybe not that awkward). Steve Carrell should be the perfect actor for this role, considering how beautifully he nailed the awkwardness of Andy in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Michael Scott in The Office. It appears, however, that excruciatingly awkward does not convert well into "slightly-out-of-place".

Carrell doesn't seem to bring it all to the show in this one. It sometimes feels like he was shoved in front of the camera before he could tie his shoe-phones. Maybe his style was stifled by a control-freak director, or maybe he just showed up to collect a paycheck and half-assed his way through ninety percent of it, much as I do at my job or Johnny Depp did in Pirates 2 & 3. I can't really blame him because this film seems sort of bored with itself throughout most of the runtime anyway, but the humor is simple and mildly enjoyable. The operative word here is "mildly".

The plot of the film is very simple, and there is a twist at the end you don't see coming (if you fast-forward to two minutes before the "big" reveal). Much of the film consists of various tense situations between Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) and Maxwell Smart wherein she coldly disregards everything he does and says for the first half of the film and he predictably fails at everything he does and says. Smart nearly gets both of them killed on numerous occasions, but somehow consistently pulls success out of his ass at just the right moment, that is, when Agent 99 isn't succeeding for him.

From what I've read, the Get Smart TV series was a blend of the James Bond spy world and the mildly retarded Inspector Clouseau. The action in the film is decent, but it falls short of the Bond-level action it's attempting to emulate. Truly great parody matches the level of its subject, and this film certainly does not. I can't speak for the TV show because my local Blockbuster doesn't carry it and my Netflix account is on hold, but this film is barely a halfway decent parody of James Bond and not even close to the comedic level of The Pink Panther. Anyone who read that last sentence and thought of the 2006 Pink Panther movie should have woodscrews drilled into their kneecaps. I must reiterate that this in no way implies that the Get Smart series may or may not have had success in this area, but if it did, the success was certainly lost in adaptation.

One final note: before we end up with a feature film version of Saved By the Bell or Family Matters, let's just put a stop to films being adapted from old TV shows. It's not that Get Smart is bad, it's just mediocre, and it's very existence is entirely unnecessary and indicative of the unnecessary genre into which it falls. Just because we all enjoyed Screech and Urkel doesn't mean we need to see actors that were barely born when these shows aired reprising the roles that were already done just fine the first time.

Films from TV shows can be bearable, like Get Smart, or sometimes even good, like Serenity or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Movie (which is what I call every Will Smith movie. That's not to say that every Will Smith movie is good. This parenthetical is way too long). It's important that old TV series, though, be left as they were. Sure, it's fun to parody The Brady Bunch by placing them in the '90's to satirize their artificiality and '70's morals through the conflict of culture disparity, but rarely do TV show adaptations attain such an objective. Usually we just end up with ghastly plagues on cinema like The Flinstones: Viva Rock Vegas. I know that was a sequel to a decent TV adaptation, but it did suck beyond description. The unnecessary sequels argument is for another article and another day. However, it is pertinent to mention that Get Smart's producers wasted no time on a spinoff/sequel thing with Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd: Out of Control. Could this be a despairing indication of what's to come? "Coming soon! Get Smart 2: Ouch That Smarts! starring Stephen Baldwin. Look for it at a theater near you!"

If this ever happens, you can catch this reviewer in a bloody bathtub near you.

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Special Features:

Disc One:

• Optional "Comedy Optimization Mode"

Disc Two:

• Featurette: "The Right Agent for the Right Job: Behind-the-Scenes Training"
• Featurette: "Max in Moscow!"
• "Language Lessons: Spotlight on Linguistics"
• Gag Reel
• "Spying on Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd Out of Control"
• Access to digital copy