Movie Reviews: Get Smart

Several critics suggest that the makers of Get Smart attempted to combine the comedy of the original Mel Brooks-Buck Henry TV series with the action of a James Bond movie -- unsuccessfully. As Kenneth Turan puts it in the Los Angeles Times: "Unaccountably eager to walk in the footsteps of James Bond, Get Smart neglects the laughs and amps up the action, resulting in a not very funny comedy joined at the hip to a not very exciting spy movie. Talk about killing two birds with one stone." Roger Ebert, however, thinks the amalgamation works. Writing in the Chicago-Sun Times, Ebert says, "It's funny, exciting, preposterous, great to look at, and made with the same level of technical expertise we'd expect from a new Bond movie itself." But Manohla Dargis of the New York Times apparently finds even writing a review of the movie distasteful. Dargis says that doing so "is pretty much like writing about the new packaging of a laundry detergent. The box may be a brighter orange, the label a little louder (Improved! Kind Of!), but the stuff inside is pretty much the same as the stuff inside every box of detergent. And, in this case, the stuff inside consists of exactly what most Hollywood movies based on old sitcoms are made of, namely feeble and funny jokes, brand actors and enough special effects to give you some bang for your summertime buck." And Liam Lacey of the Toronto Globe & Mail borrows the catch phrase from the old TV series to describe the movie: "Would you believe the new Get Smart movie is actually funny? All right then - would you believe it's better than the Bewitched movie? How about, "It doesn't make you want to crawl out of the theater with your popcorn bag over your head?" Given the record of sixties' sitcoms revived for the big screen, small successes should be celebrated."


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