Maxwell Smart (Carrell) is one of CONTROL’s top analysts. He’s a brilliant linguist, if a bit flighty, and is one of CONTROL’s most valuable assets around the office thanks to his devotion and incredibly long, detailed reports. Unfortunately, because of (or in spite of) his mind, Max is entirely too valuable to do what he really wants to do, be an active secret agent out in the field. He’s got the brains, but he’s not exactly the most formidable fighter on the block, unlike superstar Agent 23 (Dwayne Johnson, WWE’s The Rock).
While the movie has a lot of familiar faces (including Bill Murray, David Koechner, Alan Arkin, Terry Crews, Masa Oki, Patrick Warburton, Kevin Nealon, Larry Miller, James Garner, and Bernie Kopell), it’s up to the titular agent to carry the film, and Steve Carrell does so very well. He’s a very likable, smart actor with a great comedic delivery. He’s not Don Adams, but he doesn’t try to be, even when delivering his take on the classic Adams catchphrases. He equates himself well in the action sequences, and is especially crackling in the delivery of the dialogue, careful not to stray too far into Michael Scott territory.
Most of the movie hinges on Max’s relationship with the more competent and experienced Agent 99, played with a great deal of maturity and spunk by Hathaway. She’s got great chemistry with Carrell, and the two really play off one another very well from the first moment she appears on screen. Then again, Carrell works well with everyone in the movie, from the anti-Max field specialist Agent 23 to David Koechner’s mocking, boorish Larabee. Carrell is the glue that holds the picture together, but he doesn’t fight with the other characters for screen dominance, easily yielding to Ken Davitian’s Shartker or the tech geeks Bruce (Masa Oki) and Lloyd (Nate Torrence). The movie doesn’t force Smart on us, and Carrell never insists upon being the center of attention (though he does steal a lot of scenes).
I went in the theater with a ton of doubts, but I left still chuckling. It’s uncharacteristic for the film’s starring character to deliberately take a back seat to everyone else in the movie, but in this case it was a wise move that worked out in the end. Get Smart just plain worked for me, updating the humor of the show while maintaining the combination of smart dialogue and silly slapstick, with a healthy dose of added action and a TON of callbacks to the original show that consistently caused the smile to return to my face.
Whatever you might want to say about this film, about how it deviates from the original series, at least they got it right. It works and there’s legitimate chemistry between the male and female leads, and that’s more than you can say about, oh, The Incredible Hulk. It’s what a big-budget summer comedy is supposed to be.
