Get Smart (2008): C

TV’s Get Smart was a trifle hardly worthy of big-screen treatment, but given that Warner Bros. greenlit the project, couldn’t someone have actually put some effort into making it mildly entertaining? Peter Segal’s comedy concerns CONTROL rookie agent Maxwell Smart’s maiden mission against evil terrorist outfit KAOS, though the particulars of his assignment – something to do with stolen nukes in Russia – are tertiary to the raft of stale one-liners and middling action sequences that distend this comedy to a whopping 111 minutes. Perfectly cast as the bumbling secret agent made famous by Don Adams, Steve Carell has both the verbal wit and physical dexterity necessary to make such material work, but Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember’s script is so lethargic and lazy – its jokes telegraphed from a country away and its crash-boom-bang set pieces concocted with an absolute minimum of thrilling creativity – that the star is embarrassingly hung out to dry. A similar fate befalls Anne Hathaway (as love interest Agent 99), Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (as super-suave Agent 23), and Alan Arkin (as the Chief), all of whom do their best to enliven what amounts to a succession of tepid gags tethered by a flimsy narrative. But there’s no saving Get Smart, a tepid mediocrity whose idea of a big, rousing climax involves heroic feats obviously performed by stuntmen and the limp appearance of Adams’ lame, signature shoe phone.

Comments

[Liz]

This has been one of the few negative reviews I've read, and seems more in tune with the impression of the movie that I got. I'll reserve judgment until I see it.