At the Movies – Too Smart for Its Own Good

– By Mitch Silver –

“Get Smart” is an almost perfectly made comedy. An A-list cast, sharp writing, savvy directing and editing, and special effects that rival the “Mission Impossible” and Bond franchises make it a thoroughly professional film. It lacks only one thing: laughs.
“Get Smart” is to movies what those “cars of the future” are to auto shows: it has the sleek lines, futuristic controls, gleaming paint and shiny chrome of a super ride. It’s got all the bells and whistles, but it doesn’t go anywhere, because it doesn’t have an engine. And I suspect that’s not wholly the moviemakers’ fault.
It’s Ronald Reagan’s fault. When he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall,” he not only trumpeted the end of the Cold War, he took the air out of the fear balloon we used to live with and deal with (if only to park it in the back of our brains). John LeCarré made a career playing off that fear, and look what happened to him when they shut off the juice. Fleming, Connery and 007 made the Cold War larger than life. “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” made it living room-size and, a year later in 1965, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry made it funny.
Today, there is no all-pervasive standoff of spy vs. spy, no free-floating paranoia of that particular kind that made the famous opening of the show, with all the steel doors and cages opening to reveal a mere phone booth, so surprisingly funny. In fact, there are no phone booths. So what’s a 45-year-old director to do?
Peter Segal and the writers, Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember, are all 40-plus ex-TV guys who must dimly remember Don Adams and Barbara Feldon playing Agents 86 and 99 on the small screen in the living room before they were hustled off to bed in their pajamas. On the one hand, they’re nostalgic for the old “Get Smart”. On the other, they’re too professionally savvy to make a comedy for oldsters and ignore today’s audience of 12-year-olds (and the mentally 12 who serve as most of the cheerleading “critics” on fringe primetime these days) that have no memories of the show or even the Cold War.
So they did what the latest Bond flick, “Casino Royale”, did: gave us the “creation myth” of the über-spy, in this case Maxwell Smart. Now, the whole audience is in on the ground floor (okay, basement, because that’s where Smart’s phone booth/elevator deposits him). They get the closest thing to Don Adams, Steve Carell, to play him, and then they blow it by over-thinking Carell’s performance: instead of the overly cocksure, underly self-aware boss of “The Office”, we get “Evan Almighty”, the meek and the mild.
With that one bad decision, they eliminated the driveshaft that turned Maxwell Smart’s motor: Don Adams’ blissfully ignorant stupidity in the deadly war between freedom and tyranny, blundering about with his shoe phone and fouling up “by that much” until the situation was rescued by the lovely Agent 99. (The woman who’s smarter than Smart? What was topsy-turvy 40 years ago is wallpaper now, thanks to women’s lib.)
Okay, they made another not-so-great decision: by giving the role of 99 to Anne Hathaway, a fine comic actress who’s also a stunner, they made her character 20 years younger than Smart. Where Feldon, nine years junior to Adams, could bring a nurturing, almost big-sisterly quality to the character (that’s called “acting”), Hathaway has to be given a plastic surgery backstory. So her intellectual superiority to a guy named Smart, and her willingness to park that intelligence in favor of the man (so un-PC but so crucial to 99’s DNA), are blown to smithereens.
What’s left is the usual 12-year-old’s comic arsenal: bathroom jokes (twice), fat jokes (Agent 99 romances Mr. Bad on the dance floor while Agent 86 lifts a 250-pound woman through similar moves), Dwayne Johnson (a k a “The Rock”) stapling a paper to someone’s head, and Control and KAOS blowing all kinds of things up.
The closest thing to a laugh I monitored for all two hours was when the ginormous henchman working for KAOS wouldn’t stay knocked out despite a building falling on him and 86 says to 99, “I’ll say this for him — he’s no quitter.” If that sounds hilarious to you, go. If not, get smart and wait for it on cable.