Time leap ruins prospects of GET SMART 2008

Get Smart, the hip 1960’s sitcom that earned itself a sizeable following during its hay day simply by virtue of its uncanny habit of combining an odd sort of absurd humour with remorseless violence is back again, albeit on the silver screen. The movie version stars Steve Carell (of Office fame), Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson and is directed by Peter Segal.

All former aficionados of the show who have been waiting for the movie for months are advised to kindly give this one a miss and spare themselves the torture of seeing their favourite show re-hashed, ripped, throttled and slaughtered on large screen. Get yourself a tape of the old show and watch it over the weekend instead.

There is nothing really wrong with the movie by itself. The problem arises simply because the director relates it, through a completely forced, obstinate logic to the former show. In 1965 Get Smart was a goofy take on the contemporary Cold War values and a still fresh new-style comedy, which gave it an uncomfortable quirkiness which got fans hooked effortlessly. The time and the place the sitcom mushroomed out of provided important fodder for its content. By shifting base to 2008 director Segal plants a time-bomb into the script. From the beginning the movie fails to convince fans simply because of its temporal incongruity.

Of course remake movies adapted to present day scenarios have been known to work. It didn’t matter when Charlie’s Angels kicked bad asses in the 21st century. But see what happened to good ol’ Bewitched once it tried to jump decades. In terms of content Get Smart is neither as radically renovated as the Angels nor as shoddily revamped such as Bewitched, which lands it into a sad oblivion on the mind-numbing middle-ground, a place where no self respecting movie really wants to end up.

In Segal’s Get Smart Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) is the most important analyst in KONTROLL, which has lost much of the importance it enjoyed about 2 decades ago when it effectively dealt with its prime enemy, KAOS. Although a top cop Smart yearns to be a ‘real’ agent like Agent 23, played by Dwayne Johnson, who happens to be his friend. But tough luck keeps Smart strictly confined behind a desk, quietly translating terrorist banter, while the other agents shoot the guns and fight the bad guys.

However when a double agent exposes classified details about the top notch agents of KONTROLL to KAOS kingpin Siegfried and repeated attacks launched on the KONTROLL headquarters and agents on assignment freezes all operations Maxwell is unexpectedly promoted and partnered with the saucy, super snotty Agent 99 (Hathaway).

Together Max and 99 are to quickly transport themselves to Russia, find a nuke stuffed in a suitcase and…..surprise surprise……… save the world.
Unlike originally Carell’s Maxwell is an erudite, ‘sensitive’, nice guy who is a far far cry from the self-obsessed, overconfident, klutzy, moronic Max most fans of the show are used to. The thinning down of Max’s idiocy has cost the film one of the most important sub-texts of the show. Clearly Get Smart is no longer a sardonic parody of the Bond types. Instead the movie slowly transforms Smart into the same chicky-chicky-bang-bang material that the original series had tried to satirize.

Despite the obvious fallacies of director Segal one cannot help but applaud the man for having managed to land himself a magnificent cast! This, ladies and gentleman, happens to be the only saving grace of his film. Both Carell and Hathaway are at the top of their game. And although both will hopefully get over the failure of this film soon enough they really ought to know better than to waste their talent on such a complete no show production.