To say that Get Smart (2008) gets dumb is a painfully obvious joke, yet one that zeroes in on what’s wrong with this film. What’s to gain from dumbing down a TV show that’s already sillier than silly? And not just dumbing it down but filthing it up.
The phrase “ungrateful whore” has no place whatsoever in a Get Smart story, not even as an example of things people say but don’t really mean. It’s not that the words can’t be funny. The “roses are red, violets are blue, f*** you, whore” line from 500 Days of Summer is hilarious. It’s all about context.
The makers of this Get Smart film adaptation thought that bringing the show’s humor into the 21st century meant saying the kind of things that a mid-to-late-1960s network sitcom couldn’t say, but they never once stopped to consider whether the TV series would have said those things even if it could have.
Maybe it’s just me, but shouldn’t early 2000s comedy be more sophisticated than its second-half-of-the-20th-century counterpart, not less? Some films expect you to find fat people intrinsically funny; Get Smart expects us to find the idea that someone used to be fat at some indeterminate point in the past before the events of the movie inherently amusing. Actually, Get Smart also expects us to find fat people funny, especially when they’re dancing with or being dry-humped by someone who used to be fat etc., etc.
The special effects from the show have also aged better than the movie’s. The cone of silence was funny because it was a physical prop that looked as cumbersome as it was supposed to be, as opposed to a crudely rendered computer-generated visual effect that was digitally added in post-production. We can tell the characters are surrounded by nothing but air, so why even bother?
Characterization is the icing on the bull** cake. I know Steve Carell always plays the same character, but never does that become more apparent than when he’s riding someone else’s one-trick pony. He kind of looks like Don Adams, but Maxwell Smart he ain’t. Maxwell Smart does not shoot people dead. I don’t care if the bad guy is Hitler himself — that s* don’t fly.
They might as well have had Dwayne Johnson play the lead — and why not? They already had Anne Hathaway doing 99, and she is to Barbara Feldon what The Rock is to both Don Adams and Steve Carell.
