Constant Viewer: Get Smart

Say what you will about the Cold War, it was fertile soil for entertainment ranging from the literary spy novels of John le Carré to the merely literate but vastly more popular spy novels of Ian Fleming. Back when Sean Connery wasn’t just the best James Bond but the only James Bond and Constant Viewer was trying to trick out a cheap attaché case with concealed “throwing knife” letter openers, television ruthless stole paid homage to the Bond phenomenon with shows that also varied in their artistic quality, ranging from I Spy to The Man From U.N.C.L.E and, of course, Get Smart.

For those of CV’s generation who remember the original show, this weekend’s Get Smart movie includes ample allusions to its roots, especially including a scene toward the end where Agent 86, Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) pilfers some needed clothing and transportation from a curiously convenient Smithsonian Institution display. For those a little younger who could care less about shoe phones, there are plenty of laughs. Truth be told, the movie is far funnier than the television show ever was.

Which is a shame, especially considering that two of the genuine comic geniuses of the 1960s and ‘70s, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, were co-creators of the TV series. But television was a far more timid institution back then, and creative talent had significantly less creative control. Still, Don Adams’ original bumbling secret agent with his high pitched voice and running jokes (“Would you believe...?” “Missed it by that much!”) was an iconic bit of ‘60s television. (Younger audiences know the voice, if nothing else, from Adams' later Inspector Gadget.)

Get Smart finds Maxwell Smart as an intelligence analyst for the ultra-secret CONTROL. He wants to be a field agent, of course, like glamorous Agent 23 (Dwayne “I ain’t payin’ to be called the Rock any longer!” Johnson) and Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway). But the Chief (Alan Arkin) needs Max’s analytic skills more until CHAOS’s current mastermind, Sigfried (Terrence Stamp) attacks CONTROL headquarters. Sigfried intends to extort billions from the U.S. or else sell nuclear weapons to terrorists and unstable nations, so Max is paired with Agent 99 to thwart the plot and off they go from Washington to Los Angeles by way of Moscow to destroy the weapons cache and then rescue the President.

Of course the plot is merely the vehicle for the funny stuff, of which there is plenty, the romance, of which there is a little, and the action scenes, which are satisfyingly robust for what is, after all, still basically a spoof. Successfully combining such disparate elements into a single movie is no small feat, and CV gives both the writers and director Peter Segal (The Longest Yard) kudos for pulling it off.

Get Smart isn’t a blockbuster-type movie (which is not a prediction of how much business it will actually do) and it certainly isn’t a movie with any pretensions of artistic seriousness, but it’s a damned fine comedy that just about everybody should enjoy.