Get Smart: Movie Review (2008)

Directed by Peter Segal, written by Tom Astle and Matt Ember, 110 minutes, rated PG-13.

Clocking in at nearly two hours--and feeling every minute of it--is the weary new Peter Segal movie “Get Smart,” which stars Anne Hathaway’s hair, her clothes and her transfixing eyes; Steve Carell’s clipped delivery and deadpan shtick; and Dwayne Johnson’s swagger, which he’s been honing for years.

You were expecting something more? Perhaps a comedy filled with consistent laughs? A movie whose script rose to the talent of its leads? A film that didn’t feel as if it rumbled down some creaky assembly line, with people hammering away at it until it arrived in theaters dented and dinged?

Same here, but good luck finding it.

Though there are fleeting moments of humor in this otherwise bland reinvisioning of the 1960s television spy spoof that starred Don Adams and Barbara Feldon, there aren’t enough of those moments to allow the film to live up to its title. And while you sense that the likable Carell and Hathaway could be just fine together in a movie that was indeed funny, that isn’t the case here. Each is wasted.

From Tom Astle and Matt Ember’s script, the film finds Carell’s Maxwell Smart finally getting promoted from analyst to agent by Chief (Alan Arkin) when their agency, CONTROL, comes under fire by KAOS, an evil organization run by the sneering Siegfried (Terence Stamp), who has plans to blow up Los Angeles with a nuclear bomb. It’s up to Max and his new partner, Agent 99 (Hathaway), to stop Siegfried and his posse from doing so. That mission leads them to Moscow because, you know, that’s where the Cold War was when the original series aired.

Since the movie is set in the present, the Moscow angle makes little sense, but the trip abroad at least allows the movie to show off the city, which looks beautiful at night, as well as to entertain two of its better moments. The first involves Max dancing with a rather Rubenesque woman, who is aggressively light on her toes, and the other scene involves he and 99 maneuvering through laser beams in an effort to further their mission.

Otherwise, “Get Smart” routinely lays its talent flat with scattershot writing and lax direction. Those who know the original series---which was written by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, no less--will wonder what happened to it on its way to the cineplex. Obviously, it got kicked to the curb, because the movie would prefer to deliver a wealth of rote action scenes than the screwball comedy it should have offered.

And that just isn’t smart. In fact, it was a mistake.

Grade: C-