'Get Smart' movie adaptation 'missed it by that much, Chief'

Published: June 20, 2008

By veering away from the tone and style of the Mel Brooks/Buck Henry original series, Peter Segal's "Get Smart” deprives its audience and its usually hilarious star, Steve Carell, of any real fun. Like Nora Ephron's revision of "Bewitched,” this is a classic case of filmmakers not trusting good source material.

Carell plays Maxwell Smart as a meek and mildly klutzy intelligence analyst for CONTROL, the government agency entrusted with derailing KAOS, the Eastern Bloc terror group led by Siegfried (a bored-looking Terrence Stamp). Smart dreams of being a hands-on guy like Agent 23 (Dwayne Johnson), but the Chief (Alan Arkin) doesn't see Max that way.

When CONTROL learns of KAOS' plans to detonate nuclear bombs hidden in key U.S. population centers, Max gets promoted to Agent 86 and is paired with the luscious Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) to defeat KAOS' plans. Poor Max experiences a series of tough breaks, including getting harpooned in the face by a tiny spy gadget and falling out of a jet with no parachute.

The key problem with "Get Smart” is that it got too smart. Don Adams played Maxwell Smart as an arrogant bumbler, but Carell's Max is a humble and capable pencil-pusher who just wants to win the girl and save the world. There aren't many laughs to be had in that scenario, and the script by Matt Ember and Tom Astle, the team behind "Failure to Launch,” fails to live up to the talents of Carell, Arkin or Hathaway.

As for other elements of the original, the shoe phone and the original car are seen as museum pieces, while the ridiculous cone of silence gets a computer-generated treatment. The big, bulky plastic thing that dropped from the ceiling in the series was far funnier and much less expensive.

That is an apt metaphor for the failures of "Get Smart.” If Segal and the writers trusted what Brooks and Henry devised in the first place, maybe Carell would have had a chance at making something of a thankless role. Instead, it's the old "destroy your childhood memories with wrongheaded remakes” trick, Chief.

— George Lang

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