*UK EXCLUSIVE* [Movie Review] GET SMART

UK EXCLUSIVE [Movie Review] GET SMART

Not every movie can be a five ‘popcorn’ experience. I understand that. However, seeing The Dark Knight, Wall-E and Hellboy II: The Golden Army pretty much one after the other, does kind of spoil you a little. I suppose if you went from watching any or all of those three movies back to back into watching something like Meet Dave, that allegedly awful Eddie Murphy “comedy” would have its flaws heightened way more then if you were pissed up and bored on a Friday or Saturday night.

So I guess one of the greatest compliments I can offer to Peter Segal’s Get Smart is that, even in the wake of three genuinely brilliant and masterful films, it didn’t play that badly with me at all. In fact, if you assess it for what it is and what it needs to do before you even go into watching it then you’ll find that - just like Wanted (my review of which can be found here!) - it’s dumb, it’s empty-headed but it is exactly what you want from a big budget genre piece like this.

As explained to the people hosting this advanced screening, I’m as well within the ‘target grouping’ for this movie as they could possibly have hoped for: I know enough about the original source material without being easily labelled an “expert” or an “ignorant”, I’m a HUGE fan of Steve Carrell, I like a lot more of Dwayne Johnson’s big screen work then I hate and I dig enough of Peter Segal’s work as director (The Longest Yard remake, 50 First Dates, My Fellow Americans) to know he can do a good solid job with this sort of stuff AND I can forgive him for Anger Management, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps and Naked Gun 3!

In fact, I got quite a generous laugh from the audience I was sat with when I suggested at this movie’s end that they use me on the poster with the following quote “… Want to see The Dark Knight, Hellboy II or Wall-E and find yourself with sold-out screenings? Go see this! You won’t feel conned out of the price of your ticket!”

When the headquarters of CONTROL is attacked and the identities of its agents compromised, The Chief (Alan Arkin) has no choice but to promote his ever-eager analyst Maxwell Smart (Steve Carrell), who has always dreamt of working in the field alongside stalwart superstar Agent 23 (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). Bungling secret agent Maxwell Smart now finds himself on a mission to battle the forces of evil dispensed by the terrorist organisation, KAOS, with his more-competent partner Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), at his side.

To put it simply, if I go into a movie of this type I want enough giggles to justify my ticket price (if I’d paid for the ticket in the first place, mind you!) and a solid amount of action beats throughout. I want the person holding the reins of this big screen adaptation of the small screen ‘cult’ material to find a suitable tone and to commit to it, keeping it constant and in check from the get go through to the end credits. I want something akin to McG’s Charlie’s Angels (only considerably better!) and not something like McG’s Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.

Get Smart does enough to justify its existence. There’s a good level of laughs to be had and a few nifty action sequences, delivered with aplomb and conviction. The plot is far from original but the cast do some entertaining things within the confines of it. The plot twist is guessable within the first 2-3 seconds of a certain character walking on screen (and may well cause Kristina to sob seeing her future husband turn to the bad side… Oh shit, regular readers will know that is FAR too blatant a clue!) but it all bundles along so entertainingly and inoffensively that you can’t really hate the film.

This is what’s kind of staggered me a little with the critical reaction for this film. I watched The Love Guru at a screening just like this one two weeks ago and am still working on that review. I can understand the criticial attacks on that film but the same level of hatred seems to be, for the most part, being pushed in the direction of Get Smart and I can only but think “Man, really? We’re accepting Wanted into the fold for being dumb, ridiculous fun but we’re turning our nose up at this?”

I’m a big Steve Carrell fan. I think the work he is doing in The Office (second season onwards) is nothing short of superb. I think he’s one of the most giften comedians working presently and put his filmography up against the likes of other funny folks I adore and tell me that he’s nothing if not consistant? Two misses (Bewitched and Evan Almighty) to a ratio of seven hits (Horton Hears a Who, Dan in Real Life, Little Miss Sunshine, Over the Hedge, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Melinda and Melinda, and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy) in four years!

He’s got great support from a lot of the cast, specific mentions deserve to go to the awesome Alan Arkin (I thought the guy hit his peak in his role in Grosse Pointe Blank for which he was criminally denied even so much as an Oscar nomination, but clearly I was wrong!) and Dwayne Johnson, doing tongue-in-cheek rather well. Anne Hathaway bothered me though. I mean she’s an attactive lass, I’ll give her that, and she’s obviously got some degree of talent but I just didn’t buy her for one second in this film. In her defence, she is saddled with a kind of ridiculous “in-joke” involving her actually being the real ‘Agent 99′ from the original TV show who has been forced to have plastic-surgery because she messed up a mission (which is also a very safe way of writing off the twenty-odd year age difference between the main characters when the ”love” stuff kicks in towards the end). It’s not just that though, it’s the fact that I couldn’t shake from my head that in the background of the soundtrack you can definitely hear someone shouting “Look Anne - there’s a young, single millionaire over there and his criminal record is clean! RUUUUUN!” Get him! Hold Him! Love him!

I liked Get Smart. Whilst I was watching it I liked it a lot. I liked what action it threw out there. I laughed at a lot of the gags and I liked the little show-related in-jokes that I did get, including the occasional star cameos (Ryan Seacrest, James Caan, Bill Murray, Patrick Warburton), and the hundreds more that I did not. Okay, so three hours later I was talking to friends so much about the wonderous Hellboy II that I’d seen earlier in the day, that I couldn’t remember very much about this film at all.

But for what it is and what it needs to do in order to succeed well within this genre, it is very much likeable and enjoyable stuff. Come the end of the summer ’silly’ season, no one is going to be talking about Get Smart with the same level of adoration that they will Iron Man, Kung Fu Panda, The Dark Knight, Hellboy II or Wall-E but at least they’re not going to be talking about it within the same sentence as The Happening or Speed Racer.