The title alone seems like a challenge to its summer blockbuster movie competitors, like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Iron Man to “get smart”, or to “get a watchable screenplay”. Its competitors, sadly, aren’t up to the challenge, but Get Smart is up to it, and is, in fact, very, genuinely funny, so we can forgive it its few shortcomings without a moment’s thought. If there’s one summer Blockbuster that you should make a point of seeing this summer, it’s Get Smart.

Get Smart stars a perfectly cast Steve Carrell (40 Year Old Virgin, Dan in Real Life) as Maxwell Smart, the brilliant analyst for “Control”, a top-secret CIA-like agency for the United States, who can find hidden meaning for National Security in the dullest of conversations about coffee and muffins. In fact, he’s too good at it, which is why Control refuses to promote him to ‘Agent’ status until Control has no choice because all the other agents have been compromised.

Carrell (and shockingly, the script) gets the part just right: Smart is the perfect blend of intelligence, occasional ingenuity, constant wise-cracking, and incompetence which can lead to delightful physical comedy. He can sweet-talk a bad guy into hugging him instead of killing him, using all that knowledge he acquired as an analyst. He can hold his own in a fight, but he still manages to be a klutz half the time, whether it’s making a mess of the room he’s breaking into or unknowingly cutting open the behind of his pants. The physical comedy is very much like Johnny English, but the zingers and his frequent bouts of brilliance put this character and this film several notches above that.

Maxwell Smart’s partner, Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), is beautiful, experienced in the field, and competent, and in every way his match or better. Together, they make a great team, both for the comedy and the action. Hathaway’s Agent 99 is the female action lead for the 21st century: she’s smart, gutsy, and can deliver those one-liners with just the right credibility. She has field experience and she throws it in his face by echoing back his lame attempts at puns, in an even cleverer manner than he managed. The dynamic is perfect. After listening to Maxwell show off the various gadgets he has acquired that she does not have, with his token line “oh, you don’t have one of these? That’s too bad”, when she finally has a chance to pull out a gadget he doesn’t own she echoes back his line with just the right amount of snarky, snappy humour.

I like that Get Smart has the guts to treat Agent 99 as more than just “the girl”. She is not just eye candy. Anything conventionally ‘female hero’-esque that she might do, like kissing the bad guys to get her way, is mimicked exactly by Carrell’s Smart eventually. The groan-worthy lovey-dovey sap that the movie throws in here and there is equally groan worthy from the dialogue delivered by Carrell and by Hathaway, which is such a nice change from the trademark Bond male-female relationships.

The plot is not the point, it’s just the MacGuffin, as Hitchcock termed it, it’s just an excuse and a diversion. It involves some trouble-making group calling themselves Chaos, whose mission seems to be to make life difficult for Control. Carrell, the rookie, teams up with the old pro, Hathaway, and what ensues is action, shenanigans, and hilarity.

Get Smart is not a brilliant film, but for every time I groaned at some small stupidity, I laughed at least ten times more at the intentional funny parts. It’s been a while since a summer comedy/action flick brought such a smile to my face, and longer still since I saw one that I’d happily watch a second time through. I really didn’t like Carrell in 40 Year Old Virgin, but I liked him in Dan in Real Life, and I really like him here, in Get Smart: he’s that perfect mix of goofiness and suavity. The film makes you laugh, so even if it sometimes has that cheesy aesthetic of Agent Cody Banks or Johnny English, it more than makes up for it with its script, and that, is not something one gets to say too frequently about summer blockbusters.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 12:24 am and is filed under Film, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.