Get Smart: The old Adapt A Popular TV Series For The Movies And Leave Out Half The Elements That Made The Series Work In The First Place Trick

Get Smart is the funniest movie of the year!

You find that hard to believe?

Would you believe it's as at least as funny as the best episodes of the old TV series?

You don't believe that either?

Would you believe it's funnier than the revamped series from the 90s in which Andy Dick played Max and 99's son?

No?

How about it's funnier than The Nude Bomb?

Ok, it has its moments.  Steve Carell's a pretty good Maxwell Smart.  He doesn't try to do a Don Adams impersonation or make his performance an homage to Adams, the way Raul Julia did, beautifully, for John Astin in the Addams Family movies.  He plays Max as a character that Adams once played and which is now his to redefine, the way Basil Rathbone once played Sherlock Holmes and Jeremy Brett then made Holmes his own, without taking anything away from Rathbone's Holmes---an analogy that makes way too much of Smart, Adams, and Carell, I suppose, but you get the point.  Carell's Smart and Adams' Smart have enough similarities that we recognize them as the same character, but Carell adds his own touches.  His Smart is smart, for one thing, smarter than everyone else in the movie, including 99, it turns out, and he's more self-aware.   He loses his cool more than a few times, too, which Adams's Smart never did, but then with Adams we were seeing Smart in mid-career, the best agent CONTOL has, and only his nemesis Siegfried, ever doubted his abilities.  The movie shows us how Smart got his start.  By the end of the movie, Carell has his Smart showing symptoms of the heroic over-confidence that gave Adams' Smart his sublime obliviousness to danger and to his own mistakes.

But for most of the movie Carell gives us a Smart who is nervous, uncertain, and trying too hard.  Adams' Smart could be embarrassed but he never felt embarrassed.  Embarrassment (at one point literally) is Carell's Smart's defining emotion.  The result is a Maxwell Smart who has sensitive feelings and whom we're often expected to feel sorry for.  Weirdly, 99 winds up feeling sorry for him too, which is of course the very opposite of how Barbara Feldon's 99 ever felt about her adored Max.

 I could have done without Smart's sensitivity.  I could have done without the overtly sexualized nature of his relationship with 99, even though it does lead to many loving shots of Anne Hathaway showing off her spectacular legs and one quick shot of her in skimpy underwear.  Hathaway's 99, who I suppose is meant to be an update of the character, as though 99 with her devotion and deference to the obviously dimwitted and incompetent man would offend the sensibilities of our own enlightened times more than turning 99 into another version of the Hollywood action-adventure movie cliche, a boy with tits, seens to have wandered in from an adaptation of another 1960s spy series, The Girl From UNCLE.  Like April Dancer, this 99's smart, she's tough, she can save the world, but nevermind all that.  Look how hot she looks in a low-cut evening gown  Barbara Feldon managed to look smashing in neon-colored tights and waistless mini-dresses with horizontal stripes.  I actually could have done without the low-cut evening gown and the shots of Hathaway's legs and her in her underwear because I remember how Feldon made the source of her 99's sexiness her intelligence and that's something I've seen Hathaway manage in other movies.  99 was the argument against the Bond Girls.  Hathaway's 99 practically is a Bond girl.  She has a lot more in common with Barbara Bach in The Spy Who Loved Me and Halle Berry in Die Another Day, two other tough-as-nails super-spies in their own right who melt into the arms of their male rival when he proves he's tougher than they are.

I could have done without the cliched nature of 99 and Max's initial pairing.  Who needs a 99 who doesn't like Max?  For the first half of their time together 99 is just plain mean to him.  I don't see why having 99 demonstrate her superior spy skills required her to be a braggart and a show-off and a...well..bitch, except that the producers thought it would be all that more satisfying when she finally came to realize what a terrific guy and spy Max is and then just melted into gooey-ness. 

The old Pretend To Be Making The Female Lead A 21st Century Feminist Heroine While Actually Making Her Two Types of Sexist Stereotype At Once Trick.

Feldon's 99 was never blind to Max's shortcomings and mistakes.  She never hid her own light under a bushel either.  Max always overvalued his own talents, but he never undervalued 99's.  99 wasn't awed by Agent 86. She loved Maxwell Smart.

The joke was that along with everything else right under his nose Max was inclined to miss, he missed the fact that 99 was crazy about him.

In the movie, Max falls first and he spends a lot of his time pining silently for her and being much nicer to her than she is to him while he waits for her to notice what a swell guy he really is.

This is the plot of a Judd Apatow movie not Get Smart.

I could have done without all that.  I could have done without the attempts to make the movie a "real" spy movie---I'm talking about all the things that get blown up and swallowed in gigantic fireballs and about the realistic violence of the fistfights.  I could have done without the whole Secret Origin of Agent 86 plot, which was ripped off from Johnny English, but then Rowan Atkinson was plainly borrowing from Get Smart, which was itself borrowing from The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark, so I guess the whole business is a roundabout tribute to the genius of Peter Sellers and the borrowings all even out in the end.

I could have done with more of Terence Stamp's Siegfried, who---and I don't know what the producers were thinking---has only one face to face confrontation with Maxwell Smart and it's practically a throwaway that, as long as we're playing around with origins here, does nothing to establish Smart and Siegfried's lifelong roles as each other's Nemesis and, in their odd way, best friends.

I could have used at least one short scene in which Smart and Siegfried exchange friendly small talk about the cyanide-capsule flavor-of-the-month or compared the records of the CONTOL and KOAS bowling teams or exchange labor negotiation strategies---KOAS agents apparently have a better medical plan than CONTROL offers its operatives---the way they used to in the old days.

And Siegfried never once clicks his heels.

But he does get to say, "Starker"---correctly pronounced SHHHtahker---"Zis is KAOS.  Ve don't---" insert stupid noise, gesture, or goofy words of enthusiasm Starker's just blurted out here---once, and Stamp delivers the line beautifully.

I could not have done without Alan Arkin's Chief who has some of the best lines in the movie and anchors the scenes that come closest to the spirit of the TV show.  The Chief may be the first time since The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! that Arkin has been allowed to play it congenial and to act as if his character actually likes other characters.  Arkin's Chief doesn't get as exasperated with Carell's Smart as Edward Platt's Chief did with Adams'.  But he gets that the Chief actually liked and respected Smart.

I'm not sure if I could have done with a few more reprises of the TV series' famous catchphrases.  Smart is only sorry about what he just did to the Chief once, by my count.  He asks only one person if they would believe this or that.  And he misses something by that much just twice.

Maybe it was best not to overdo a good thing.  But the scriptwriters missed one big one, and there was the perfect set-up for it, right at the end.

Max and 99 are about to go out on another mission together and it would have been a good point for the Chief to warn Max of the dangers he was about to face, about how he would be under constant threat, how he would be dodging certain death at every turn.

To which Max would have said:

"And LOVING it!"

Spoiler alert for fans of the series.  Stop reading here if you don't want to know.

He's in it.

If you're a fan, you know who he is, and you were hoping he would be and worried that he wasn't, because he's obviously not in the trailers.  But he's in it.

I'm not really spoiling it because you get the heads up he'll be showing up early in the movie.

He's in it and you'll get a kick out of it and out of who plays him.

But you'll wonder why no one mentions how he's programmed for goodness and niceness.

Comments

[Tom Hilton]

Get Smart was an essential part of my childhood. I think I'll skip this one--it sounds like they radically redefined the characters and the relationship between them.

[Dan]

I enjoyed it, basically, but it was one of those "most of the funniest parts are in the trailer" kinds of movies.

To follow your construction:

I could have done without his "recovering fatty" origin. Yet another movie about people should be ashamed of their body. Relatedly, the dancing-with-the-fat-woman scene was a bit of a mixed bag. It's nice that the model-types get embarrassed by the heavy woman's dancing talent, but ... although the movie may never laugh at the fat woman, the audience surely does. "Ha. Ha. Look at how fat she is. Laugh. Laugh." Ick.

I could NOT have done without Steve Carrell as Max. I am becoming more and more convinced that he's a genius. I thought his take on the character was perfect, even if a slight departure from Adams' take.

[eglenn]

I could NOT have done without Steve Carrell as Max. I am becoming more and more convinced that he's a genius. I thought his take on the character was perfect, even if a slight departure from Adams' take.

Yeah, his Paul Lynde was pretty much the only enjoyable part of the Bewitched movie and his Daily Show appearance on Monday (where he whipped out his checkbook and asked John 'how much for the show?') leads me to believe the guy has 'IT'.

[Brad]

>>He's in it and you'll get a kick out of it and out of who plays him.<<

The original is still alive, isn't he?

[Dan]

"Yeah, his Paul Lynde was pretty much the only enjoyable part of the Bewitched movie" You mean someone else watched that dreck besides me?!?!

[Lance]

Brad,

The original is alive and well and he has his own website. I won't link to it, but it's easy to find. Top of the google search. He turns out to be a talented artist and caricaturist.

[Campaspe]

We can always do with more Terence Stamp. Love that man, love him. I wrote last week about my father's crush on Cyd Charisse. Well, you should see the way my mother's face goes all dim and dreamy the second you mention Stamp.

[outofcontext]

I was surprised that the movie was passable entertainment for a matinee date with my wife. I was not at all disappointed that it bore so little resemblance to the original. In fact, I dreaded that it would try. Carrell seems like a genuinely nice guy and very competent at his persona.
I enjoyed Alan Arkin as the chief.
Get Smart is one of my favorite shows, but I don't see how you can get 100 minutes out continuous plotted story of it.
Farcical movies are tough. In fact, I can't think of many worthwhile ones--maybe What's New Pussycat? or The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Maybe I'm disproving myself there; after all, wasn't Smart just an American Spy version of Clouseau?
Well, now I've convinced myself that I am disappointed.