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'Get Smart': Fails to get funny

It's best to remember popular '60s TV series as it was, not as it was remade

By Roger Moore The Orlando Sentinel

Surely after the fiasco of Speed Racer, Warner Bros. was ready to say sayonara to lame 1960s TV ­adaptations. But plainly there wasn't time for the studio to, ahem, get smart about that.

Thus, we're treated to a big-­budget, big stars, big explosions big-screen blowout of Get Smart, the Mel Brooks-Buck Henry TV comedy that is far better in ­memory than it was in reality. An intermittently funny goof on the James Bond mania of the '60s, it would seem a natural feature-film subject, especially since they landed Steve Carell to play the role that Don Adams ”Would you believe'd“ into the pop-culture psyche, Maxwell Smart.

But as apt at the casting of the beetle-browed Carell is — he does ”clueless“ as well as anybody — as much money and talent as they had to throw at this monstrosity, it rarely generates laughs. It's pleasant enough, especially when Anne Hathaway, in bombshell Agent 99 mode, is on screen, or when Dwayne ”Once The Rock“ Johnson is vamping or when Oscar winner Alan Arkin is fuming some anti-vice president rant as The Chief. But chuckles? Dearly bought.

Smart is an analyst for super-secret Control, an agency allegedly disbanded after the end of the Cold War. He has just passed his ”agent“ test (on the eighth try), but wins a field assignment only when Control is compromised by KAOS. Somebody is buying yellowcake uranium from the Russians. The nerdy new Agent 86 and the absurdly gorgeous Agent 99 must team up to track down the sellers, the buyers and the bombs that will come from that.

Spectacular fights and shootouts (a comedy with a very high body count) are followed by slapstick stunts, this or that homage to the old TV show or old Bond movies (borrowed stunts, a tribute to the villain ”Jaws“) and a growing flirtation/jealousy ­between 99 and 86, humorously played out in a silly tango scene.

Carell seems a little lost as to how to make Max different from his characters in TV's The Office and the other big-budget comedies he has deadpanned his way through. Hathaway is game for more goofiness than the movie provides, and Terrence Stamp isn't allowed to play a funny villain. Johnson is the only player who lands laughs as the haughty Super Agent friend to Max, Agent 23.

Well, aside from the Control agents who live to tease Max ­(Terry Crews and David ­Koechner). They call him ”Maxi-pad,“ which might be the funniest line in the picture.

Cameos by Bill Murray (why?) and Bernie Kopell (from the ­original show), Smart's original shoe phone, the Sunbeam and the VW Carmen Ghia he drove in the series deliver a little nostalgia.

But allusions to a sequel will seem disheartening if this overlong clunker, directed by one of Adam Sandler's house-hacks (Peter Segal), tanks. It's merely the third funniest ”star“ comedy of the ­summer, after The Love Guru and You Don't Mess With the Zohan.

Missed it by that much?

Not even that close.