Get Smart?

Poor Steve Carell.

So funny in some roles, so awkwardly unfunny in others. The man has talent; when he’s portraying a deluded corporate cog in The Office, he’s dead-on hilarious. But when he played a Moses figure in Evan Almighty, the result was a film so bad that it may take surgery to remove its wretchedness from my retinas.

Carell is proof that an actor is only as good as his material. A great script poorly acted can sometimes be salvaged into a decent film, but a bad script is inevitably garbage.

Now Carell is back as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86 in Get Smart, the latest revival / reinvention of a classic 1960s TV series. The original was of course a Mel Brooks vehicle starring Don Adams and Barbara Feldon. Get Smart tries to be both a comedy and an action film. By splitting its time and efforts, the script doesn’t really work on either level. Sure, there are a few laughs here and there (the number of laugh-out-jokes fits comfortably on one hand), and some high-octane action scenes, but not enough of either to please any but the most undemanding audiences.

The plot, such as it is, involves intelligence analyst drone Maxwell Smart, who is promoted to special agent and paired with sexy superspy Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway). Using only their wits and a few James-Bond type spy gadgets, they head off to stop criminal mastermind Siegfried (ultracampy Terence Stamp) from killing lots of people.

Oh, and the funny? The film’s idea of humor is constant bickering between Agents 86 and 99. Smart is ridiculed for being an inexperienced desk jockey; 99 is mocked for not having the latest laser-guided spy watch gadget thingy. The one-upsmanship gets old quickly, and later replaced by a bizarre dance-off competition between 86 and 99 during a ritzy dinner party. The scene comes out of nowhere, and does nothing to either advance the plot or add to the humor.

You have to wonder if at some point Carell didn’t stop and wonder, “Who wrote this crap?” In this case, two screenwriters share the blame for creating this thoroughly mediocre script that obstinately refuses to provide more than a few laughs: Matt Ember and Tom J. Astle. Get Smart needed more smarts, especially about what made the original series funny.