My favorite moment from Get Smart is when Steve Carrell's Maxwell Smart character is being complimented on a test he's recently taken to get a promotion at the spy agency CONTROL. The Chief (Alan Arkin), head of CONTROL, saysn he particularly liked Max's essay on existentialism. "But I left that blank, sir," Max says and the Chief laughs thinking that Max is such a thorough master of existentialism that he would understand the ironic beauty of submitting a blank essay on the subject when, in fact, Max simply knows nothing about it. That's one of the reasons that pulls Get Smart above the standard summer movie stupidity that keeps trying to drag it down.
I wasn't expecting much from Get Smart for several reasons. The first one is that it's a comedy and most comedies are seemingly made by and for retarded people who think that "comedy" means to have several scenes where someone falls face down in cow flop. The second reason is that it's a movie version of an old TV series and I would say that most of those suck except that would be an insult to things that suck. The third reason is that it stars Steve Carrell who proved with The 40 Year Old Virgin and Little Miss Sunshine that he could do no wrong and then went on to prove that, in fact, he could do buttloads of wrong when he starred in Evan Almighty. However, I actually ended up enjoying Get Smart.
Maxwell Smart in this movie is not the idiot he was when Don Adams played him back in the 60s. In fact, he starts off as an extremely competent analyst who writes overly detailed reports that no one reads because they're hundreds of pages long and contain details like what sort of muffins were eaten that morning by suspected terrorists. Smart unfortunately is more like an idiot savant. He's a masterful analyst who is fairly inept when dealing with people and situations in the real world instead of analyzing them.
Smart gets to live his dream of being a field agent when a raid on CONTROL headquarters by the evil organization known as KAOS gives KAOS the name of CONTROLS's undercover field agents so Max must now fill in. He is partnered with the beautiful and highly skilled Agent 99 played by Anne Hathaway. Since they're destined to be lovers, she must thoroughly loathe Max when she first meets him. Their first assignment together is to investigate Anne Hathaway's ex-boyfriend HA! but I kid. Sorry Anne, I couldn't resist. I guess this means that my dream of us someday playing together on the same bowling team will never be fulfilled.
Seriously, their first assignment is to investigate a Russian black market dealer who may have been supplying KAOS with nuclear materials. This leads to a funny take off of those scenes in Bond films where the spies go to a posh party. 99 dances with the dealer and tries to get him to spill everything he knows for no other reason than that she's hot (it works). 99's flirtations make Max jealous and cause him to join the dance with a very large Russian girl that actually goes off much better than you'd expect.
One of the movie's biggest weaknesses is the villain, Siegfried. In the show, Siegfried was played by Bernie Koppel (who has a cameo in this movie) and was a cartoonish stereotype. I should add that he was a very funny cartoonish stereotype and I used to like it when Siegfried was on the show. The movie's Siegfried is played very seriously by Terrence Stamp. On the other hand, Get Smart have a nice compliment of funny supporting characters including Dwayne Johnson as the nearly perfect Agent 23 who makes Max feel inadequate both by his competence and the fact that he's 99's former boyfriend and no, this one never fraudulently claimed to represent the Vatican HA! I did it again. Anne Hathaway, on the off chance that you Google your own name so much that you got to page 135 of the search and found this, I feel dirty now if that's any consolation.
As with most big summer comedies, it devolves toward the end into a series of chase scenes. Also, KAOS is secretly run by a traitor working inside of CONTROL and if you can't guess who it is, it means that you've never seen a movie before or, for that matter, ever been out of the house before. Still, it has lots of good parts and only a few bad ones and, in the end, you can't really ask for much more than that. Well, you could, but you'd be wasting your time.
Digg This.
No comments:
Post a Comment