370 - Get Smart review

Would it surprise you to learn that Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway have no chemistry on the big screen? Not if you have eyes and ears, I hope. They take on the roles of Maxwell Smart and Agent 99 in “Get Smart,” based on an excellent 1960’s TV series of the same name. Whereas the TV series spoofed James Bond-style spy movies, this one really doesn’t spoof anything other than George W. Bush, and that’s only for two scenes.

“Get Smart” is a long, derivative comedy that should have been a lot more fun for all the effort put into it. As an eight-year-old, I made sure to catch the series every night on Nick at Nite. It was funny and with silly plots that often managed to function well as decent spy material.

The film manages to sneak in a few laughs that aren’t featured in the advertisements, though for the most part the jokes are of the strained, trifling variety, with lots of emphasis placed on the oh-so-predictable fallbacks such as gay jokes, fat jokes, and people getting slammed in the reproductive organs. Tee-hee.

As for the plot itself, it’s as if they took the sort of brainstorming that writers tend to do and just wrote down the first thing that came up. Imagine a screenwriter in his office at the start of his first day of work on “Get Smart”: “Okay, so, we have Maxwell Smart, right? And he and Agent 99, they go to some exotic location, like oh, say, Moscow, and they find that the terrorists, they’re trying to make nuclear weapons, right? Max and 99 get in some fights with bad guys and they argue with one another but they totally get the hots for each other along the way, right? And oh, there’s like a big chase at the end and one of the characters turns out to be a bad guy, right? Right. Ca-ching.”

Plot threads are set up with no resolution, and the protagonist veers wildly from being a complete idiot to a master spy and then back again. I’d have preferred it if they settled on skilled but hapless, but even master spy would be preferable to “whatever whim the script has at that moment.”

Dwayne Johnson, the artist formerly known as The Rock, has a supporting role as Agent 23, a hotshot operative that remains at base while the comparatively bumbling Smart does the fighting. If you thought Johnson participating in those dopey family movies was a stretch, wait until you see this one, where he gets beat up by Steve Carell. Glad to see that “next Arnold Schwarzenegger” thing is working out real well for him. Alan Arkin has a zinger or three as Smart’s boss, while a host of celebrities pop up: Bill Murray, James Caan, Terrence Stamp, Kevin Nealon, and Patrick Warburton all have a minute or two. Too bad they mostly have nothing to do, which is how I felt when I checked my watch and realized that the movie was only half over.

2 out of 5