Kelly Wand"Get Smart" review
June 24th 2008 02:21
Come for the Carell, stay for the Hathaway
Hollywood has done it again: repackaged a TV show from the ‘60s as a summer entertainment for people born in the ‘90s! If you thought the Rock’s forehead was funny in “The Rundown,” wait till you see it banged into stuff in this*!
Steve Carell reprises Don Adams’ Maxwell Smart as someone who’s smart 50% of the time and dumb the other 50%; in other words, you’ll be laughing 50% of the time (the fact that he wears the exact same suit that he does on “The Office” and uses the exact same verbal cadences is a bit distracting). Creamily luscious Anne Hathaway gives easily the movie’s best and most arduous performance as Smart’s briefly long-suffering partner agent 99; she’s called on not just to kick guys in the face with high heels but be exasperated with Carell, fall in love with him, jog, wriggle, dance, skydive, confess she’s middle-aged, and deliver a surprising amount of straight lines about a blown mission and ex-boyfriend, and she never misses a beat. At the other extreme, Alan Arkin flies a plane.
The movie feels nothing like the original show and there are far too many pedestrian action sequences (don’t execs know people don’t see action comedies for the car chases?) that tend to drag on. A computer-generated Cone of Silence just isn’t as funny as a plastic novelty-shop one. The “Foul Play”-esque finale is especially weak, with Max surviving a fiery death offscreen (gee, were we supposed to be worried for a few seconds while Hathaway tears up?) and not even meeting Siegfried face to face let alone playing a hand in his dispatch, followed by an anti-climactic scene where he simply guesses a bomb’s location in a concert hall. Do they defuse it on time? Apparently.
Yet “Smart” also has an honorable amount of decent zingers and inspired sequences, mostly in the middle, the best of which revolves around Max in an airliner toilet with a mini-crossbow (spoiler alert), followed by a totally unmotivated dance number that’s kind of charming.
A formulaic, expensive studio piffle but not the worst of piffles, especially for those interested in seeing Hathaway’s ass in a variety of sheer gowns.
And loving it.
*In the Rock’s comedy defense, he does staple David Koechner’s testicle-like head and shoot a paintball into Koechner’s head-like testicles, all three of which have seriously had it coming since “Snakes on a Plane”.
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