Review: 'Get Smart'

"GET SMART" is a film mistaken about its own identity. As a reworking of one of the great 1960s TV comedies, you'd think being funny would be its main goal. But you would be wrong. Very, very wrong.

Like its protagonist, in-over-his-head secret agent Maxwell Smart, "Get Smart" yearns to be something it's not. Unaccountably eager to walk in the footsteps of James Bond, "Get Smart" neglects the laughs and amps up the action, resulting in a not very funny comedy joined at the hip to a not very exciting spy movie. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

Making it all that much more perplexing is that the original show, created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry and starring the exquisitely earnest Don Adams as Agent 86 and Barbara Feldon as the soignée Agent 99, seemed so effortlessly funny.

Screenwriters Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember (credited on the unremarkable "Failure to Launch") have brought back many of the trademarks of the TV series, including the iconic shoe phone, robot agent Hymie and the dreaded Cone of Silence. Perhaps as a tribute to Brooks, they've upped the film's Yiddish quotient as well, with a character named Nudnik Shpilkes.

But for reason or reasons unknown, the filmmakers have decided to retool Maxwell Smart's personality. Instead of Adams' guileless ineptitude, Steve Carell, normally an exceptionally funny individual, has been encouraged to play Agent 86 as someone who is actually moderately capable. The actor insists in the media notes that he wanted to avoid impersonation and "tap into the essence of the character," but whatever you call it, it's not very amusing.

Compounding this problem is "Get Smart's" determination to turn itself into what the studio is calling an action comedy. That means multiple fight scenes, several fiery explosions and a multitude of stunts, including an elaborate car-plane chase and a multi-person parachute jump without enough chutes. Are you laughing yet?

Unfortunately, director Peter Segal, a graduate of the Adam Sandler School for Comedy ("The Longest Yard," "50 First Dates" and "Anger Management") is incapable of making any of this action play other than perfunctory. Nor is he any better attempting to forge, no kidding, a genuine emotional connection between Smart and Agent 99 (a game if overmatched Anne Hathaway). Now why didn't Buck and Mel think of that?