Get Smart

This next week I'll be viewing some Anne Hathaway films that somehow I've missed. Hathaway is not only one of the more physically appealing actresses in Hollywood today, but she's also very talented. She probably deserved the Oscar for Rachel Getting Married, but Kate Winslet was due.

I kick things off with Get Smart (by the way, I won't be watching Bridal Wars), the big-screen adaptation of the sixties spy spoof. Directed by Peter Segal, this film tries to do two things and ends up doing neither--it is not particularly funny, and isn't very good as an action thriller either.

Steve Carell takes the part of Maxwell Smart. In this reimagining, Smart is a officious analyst who has taken the field agent several times. He finally passes, but is told by the Chief (Alan Arkin) that he's too valuable as an analyst to be promoted. Then Control (the agency for which he works, and pointedly not the CIA) is attacked, and he and Agent 99 (Hathaway) team up to stop the villainous organization KAOS from buying nuclear bomb material.

I've read interviews with Carell in which he strenuously points out that Smart is not a boob or an incompetent, he's just a little clumsy. Fair enough, but this film jettisons a lot of what made Mel Brooks and Buck Henry's show funny, and instead ends up as a third-rate spy film. I counted only about three chuckles in the whole thing (one of them was a sight gag involving a beaded curtain that just hit my funny bone the right way) but most of the jokes fell flat. There's a long, pointless scene in which Smart dances with a plus-sized woman, and even a cameo by Bill Murray in a tree didn't earn any laughs.

It's as if the writers and director were determined not to be too funny, and instead we get a warmed over Cold War thriller. The story, involving a bomb planted in the Walt Disney Concert Hall while the president (James Caan, an inspired casting choice) attends hardly even matters. Dwayne Johnson is on hand as a dashing agent and adds nothing, and we get a big chase scene involving a train, a plane and an automobile that isn't anything we haven't seen before.

One wonders what this film could have been. I like Carell, and Hathaway is a pleasure as the coolly deadly 99. Arkin was also in the fun spirit of things as the Chief. We get remnants of the old show--a cameo by Bernie Kopell (the original Siegfried) and the catch-phrases: "Sorry about that, Chief," "Would you believe..." and "Missed it by that much," but upon hearing them one feels a tinge of regret. The original show wasn't genius, but it was a lot more fun than this.