I didn’t expect Get Smart to be really good and I didn’t think it would be really bad either. I simply expected it to just be. After seeing it, I can honestly say that it lived up to my expectations, however leaning more to the generally good than it does the bad. Having never seen the show the film is based on I have no idea how much was a throwback and how much was original, but this doesn’t amount to much more than a James Bond spoof and there are certainly a few laughs to be had resulting in what could ultimately be considered a harmless film.
Director Peter Segal is coming off a real stinker in the form of Adam Sandler’s The Longest Yard, but he has managed to team up a good sized cast for this television adaptation and doesn’t give any one character an overwhelming amount of screen time.
Get Smart is being sold as a Steve Carell vehicle with Anne Hathaway in tow as the beauty of the bunch and The Rock as the brawn. Carell stars as Maxwell Smart, a dedicated analyst working for the black ops U.S. espionage group Control . Smart’s longtime dream is to become a Control agent and he gets his chance when Control’s nemesis, Kaos, hits the group hard resulting in the identities of all the bureau’s agents in jeopardy. Smart is put into action and partnered with Agent 99 (Hathaway), whose identity is still safe after recently undergoing massive facial surgery.
One thing many fans of Carell may have a hard time getting used to is that this isn’t an endless stream of dumbed down comedy. Get Smart is oftentimes very subtle in its humor and doesn’t rely on over exaggerated movements and yelling for its jokes. I would also say that the Control Chief played by Alan Arkin gets the majority of the laughs in the film while Carell is actually rather subdued.
Carell aside, the biggest surprise for me was Hathaway, and not for her comedy, even though when she referred to her “dusty vagina” it did give me a pretty good laugh. No, this is quite possibly the first movie I have seen Hathaway in that she actually seemed like a real woman. I have never really believed in Hathaway as an actress. She was decent in The Devil Wears Prada and I thought she was awful in Brokeback Mountain, in a role she was entirely wrong for. I have never seen her Princess Diaries efforts, but I don’t think they would be valid barometers in this conversation anyway. Hathaway impresses in all facets and it was nice to finally be firmly in her corner.
Like I said in the first graph, this is a harmless film that you are more likely to enjoy than dislike. I can’t imagine anyone coming out of Get Smart feeling anything other than happy. It’s a genuine film and it doesn’t pander to the audience to any great extent. It avoids most cliches and outside of its version of Bond’s Q branch it really was a decent film.
