Get Smart
Directed by Peter Segal
Who among today’s movie-going demographic remembers the 1960s Get Smart TV series? Or its signature quips “Sorry about that, Chief!” “Missed it by that much!” “Would you believe...?” Today, those once-recognizable phrases ring a bell without a clapper.
The new Steve Carell movie version of that series (which ran on NBC from 1965 to 1970) takes us deeper into the modern insanity of pointless movie adaptations like The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies and even Miami Vice. Great literature and stage plays have lost cultural clout to TV and comic books. No doubt this Get Smart remake was green-lit for no one but nostalgic boomer-era studio executives.
Reviving the story of the bumbling operative Maxwell Smart, aka Agent 86, and his girlfriend-sidekick Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) doesn’t relate to the current attitude toward government or international espionage (typified by the horribly cynical Charlie Wilson’s War.) Secret agents are remote from post-Watergate, post-Clinton realpolitik. When Carell’s Smart winks at hearing that his agency, CONTROL, “was disbanded after the Cold War,” the hollow bell’s silence is deafening. So is the moldy joke that CONTROL was America’s answer to the Soviet Union’s KAOS. (Those meaningless acronyms were Mad magazine–style euphemisms for the CIA and the KGB.)
Instead of expressing public indifference to international spies or apathy about America’s foreign policy, Get Smart is merely a commercial franchise. Like one of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” products, its continuity between the TV past and contemporary Hollywood is the fiat of middle-aged media moguls. Only a child alienated from Grand Theft Auto IV or Guitar Hero would expect a story from this. Get Smart’s half-hearted plot (foiling a nuclear-bomb threat), joke set-ups (frat-boy antics among the agents) and noisy fight scenes are just formalities in the Summer Blockbuster, Bow Down to Hollywood ritual.
Recall that the original TV series had a point—to spoof the James Bond spy-movie craze. Simplified and satirized by humorists Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, the TV show distilled and abstracted Bond motifs (subliminal political intrigue, arch physical confrontations, absurd gadgetry and tiny bits of comic sexual frisson). It was a response to a cultural happening; whereas now, director Peter Segal and his screenwriting team don’t even dare satirize the Bourne movies. Out of Hollywood insecurity, the film’s style simulates the Bourne choppy incoherence and loud, literally violent action (whereas the TV series was slapstick). The final big chase scene between Agents 86, 99 and their nemesis Siegfried (Terence Stamp) is simply planes, trains and automobiles—with a fireball at the climax.
At least Carell and Hathaway are well cast. They are parodies of good-looking people—both kewpie dolls, right for a subtle brand of absurdism. Not as loony as Don Adams, Carell’s punctiliousness can be poignantly middle-class. And Hathaway updates the fashion-model chic of Barbara Feldon’s original 99. More than TV caricatures, they both confess body issues: Max from his overweight past and 99 suffers an identity crisis due to job-related plastic surgery. When she confides: “I used to look like my mother,” their shared craziness suggests a richer comedy was possible—then abandoned. Get Smart tempts one toward the cynical thought that summer entertainment is deliberately meaningless. Should Hollywood ever grow up, Carell and Hathaway would be ideal for another remake: God forbid it’s TV’s Moonlighting, but how about The Thin Man?
Directed by Peter Segal
Who among today’s movie-going demographic remembers the 1960s Get Smart TV series? Or its signature quips “Sorry about that, Chief!” “Missed it by that much!” “Would you believe...?” Today, those once-recognizable phrases ring a bell without a clapper.
The new Steve Carell movie version of that series (which ran on NBC from 1965 to 1970) takes us deeper into the modern insanity of pointless movie adaptations like The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies and even Miami Vice. Great literature and stage plays have lost cultural clout to TV and comic books. No doubt this Get Smart remake was green-lit for no one but nostalgic boomer-era studio executives.
Reviving the story of the bumbling operative Maxwell Smart, aka Agent 86, and his girlfriend-sidekick Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) doesn’t relate to the current attitude toward government or international espionage (typified by the horribly cynical Charlie Wilson’s War.) Secret agents are remote from post-Watergate, post-Clinton realpolitik. When Carell’s Smart winks at hearing that his agency, CONTROL, “was disbanded after the Cold War,” the hollow bell’s silence is deafening. So is the moldy joke that CONTROL was America’s answer to the Soviet Union’s KAOS. (Those meaningless acronyms were Mad magazine–style euphemisms for the CIA and the KGB.)
Instead of expressing public indifference to international spies or apathy about America’s foreign policy, Get Smart is merely a commercial franchise. Like one of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” products, its continuity between the TV past and contemporary Hollywood is the fiat of middle-aged media moguls. Only a child alienated from Grand Theft Auto IV or Guitar Hero would expect a story from this. Get Smart’s half-hearted plot (foiling a nuclear-bomb threat), joke set-ups (frat-boy antics among the agents) and noisy fight scenes are just formalities in the Summer Blockbuster, Bow Down to Hollywood ritual.
Recall that the original TV series had a point—to spoof the James Bond spy-movie craze. Simplified and satirized by humorists Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, the TV show distilled and abstracted Bond motifs (subliminal political intrigue, arch physical confrontations, absurd gadgetry and tiny bits of comic sexual frisson). It was a response to a cultural happening; whereas now, director Peter Segal and his screenwriting team don’t even dare satirize the Bourne movies. Out of Hollywood insecurity, the film’s style simulates the Bourne choppy incoherence and loud, literally violent action (whereas the TV series was slapstick). The final big chase scene between Agents 86, 99 and their nemesis Siegfried (Terence Stamp) is simply planes, trains and automobiles—with a fireball at the climax.
At least Carell and Hathaway are well cast. They are parodies of good-looking people—both kewpie dolls, right for a subtle brand of absurdism. Not as loony as Don Adams, Carell’s punctiliousness can be poignantly middle-class. And Hathaway updates the fashion-model chic of Barbara Feldon’s original 99. More than TV caricatures, they both confess body issues: Max from his overweight past and 99 suffers an identity crisis due to job-related plastic surgery. When she confides: “I used to look like my mother,” their shared craziness suggests a richer comedy was possible—then abandoned. Get Smart tempts one toward the cynical thought that summer entertainment is deliberately meaningless. Should Hollywood ever grow up, Carell and Hathaway would be ideal for another remake: God forbid it’s TV’s Moonlighting, but how about The Thin Man?
