Jessica Alfieri
writes everything you see here.
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Early Reviews: Get Smart
Early Reviews is a new series of movie reviews by guest poster, Eric. Reviews are based solely on seeing the trailer. Many facts are made up. All opinions are untrustworthy. Readers making any decisions based on this review do so at their peril. Look for coverage of all the summer blockbusters to come.
With such a talented cast and a rich comedic pedigree, high expectations are understandable for Get Smart. Although the cast is superb individually, some serious flaws prevent Get Smart from being a great comedy.
A legacy like the Don Adams’s 1960s tv series is a mixed blessing, with the obvious downside of setting expectations nostalgia-level high. Even without rose-colored memories, Don Adams was a unique comedic talent. Steve Carell has the unenviable task of choosing between imitating Adams or “not being true to the material”. It turns out to be too much of the latter.
The television show was earnestly silly, helmed by a man who never winked at the audience, paving the way for classics like Naked Gun. While Steve Carell may rival Leslie Neilsen for talent, Get Smart is no Naked Gun.
The film is too self aware, too ironic, too meta. The show made fun of the spy genre and made fun of itself. The film makes fun of making fun of making fun of .. (several layers of irony later) .. itself, becoming an inflated soufflé of post-modernism.
Which is a shame, since the cast is acting their brains out. Anne Hathaway is ten gallons of talent in a two gallon role. Even Dwayne Johnson, as Agent 23, seems to have more to give than the script wants.
The story is fatally uneven, spending too much time on things other than, you know, the story. It’s understandable for this movie to spend time introducing the setting and characters; it’s not acceptable to wait until 40 minutes in before we meet Hathaway’s Agent 99. And how many times can we watch a phone booth gag when Smart enters C.O.N.T.R.O.L. headquarters? The answer is, evidently, seven.
There’s no depth to the villains or plot, even by the earthworm-low levels expected from the campy source material. A cardboard adversary may have worked in a thirty minute television format, but it’s not enough to hold up over two and half hours of comedy. The ending is a convenient deus ex machina (I won’t spoil it now, but remember that the shoe phone isn’t Smart’s only technological clothing), which isn’t interesting or funny enough to be something other than “oh, we have to wrap up this plot.”
The technology is another example of unwelcome self-awareness. Smart’s shoe-phone has a touch screen; the Cone of Silence is made of force fields; Agent 99 caries a phaser. The technology was delightfully silly in the ’60s show; making it “modern” stripped it of its camp value.
Ultimately I see this as a struggle between talent and material. We know Carell can shine; he’s done so on The Office, in The 40 Year Old Virgin, and in Little Miss Sunshine. However, even he can’t revive a dead script like Evan Almighty, or (unfortunately) Get Smart. I hope he develops better judgment, lest he becomes Jim Carrey – a tremendous talent wasted on junk movies.
Final Review
Will go see it again in theaters.
Will rent it on DVD.
Will not rent it, but if I knew then what I know now, still would have chosen to see it in theaters.
Wish I had waited to rent it.
Wish I hadn’t seen it.
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