IESB Presents - FilmGeekz.com - Get Smart

Get Smart - Review Hot

Movie Reviews

Release Date: June 20, 2008
Studio: Warner Bros.
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Genre: Action • Comedy
Director: Peter Segal
Writers: Tom J. Astle, Matt Ember
Cast: Steve Carrell, Anne Hathaway,Alan Arkin,Dwayne (The Rock)Johnson, Terrace Stamp
Synopsis: Secret agents for the nearly defunct CONTROL, Max Smart and Agent 99 must stop the evil members of KAOS from blowing up The President of The United States of America in this high tech high laugh summer comedy based on the television show created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry.
The Review: **** REVIEW SUMMARY FOR WARNER BROTHERS FILM : GET SMART*****PREPARED BY E.WOOD AGENT 3.14*DISTRIBUTE TO ALL FIELD AGENTS

GET SMART opens with the familiar Warner Brothers Logo spiliting down the middle and opening up like a piece of high-tech clock work.

From there, we get bounced from a satellite in high orbit to various places around our planet (Earth) to an apartment in Washington DC, where someone-sight unseen is getting ready for work.This bachelor pad is filled with Post-it (tm) notes, including this one on an empty fish bowl: "Note to self: get new fish!"
It's obvious that the occupant is too occupied with...something...that he can't actually live his life .

Mr. Anonymous is revealed to be **DECLASSIFIED**Steve Carell as MAXWELL "MAX" SMART, and we follow him into the main building of The Smithsonian Museum; a gaggle of school children are looking at a display of antique spygear including a shoe that appears to also be a phone...and they are told that the instruments in the small, but sincere collection one belonged to the anti-spy group CONTROL , an entity which dissolved around the time of Richard Nixon.

**RICHARD M. NIXON THIRTY-SEVENTH PRESIDENT OF THE USA 1969-1974**

He slips into a disused hallway as the brassy theme to the "Get Smart" television show

* " Get Smart" 1965-1970 CREATED BY MEL BROOKS & BUCK HENRY * rises up. Max walks through steel corridors and doorways of steel and each portal opens in a manner more complicated and convoluted than the previous.

**REVIEWER'S OPINION-NOT VERIFIED**
How convoluted? Well, I swear I saw the slamming chompers of the NSEA Protector's engineering section from GALAXY QUEST and at one point, again, I could be wrong, Max is spanked by 26 mini briefcases as he strides through a phalanx of "Deal Or No Deal" models dressed in silver short-pant jumpsuits with white "Go-go" boots.

**CONTINUE**
He finally makes it to the main lobby of CONTROL.
Max's co-workers are an odd bunch including the nearly perfect AGENT 23 (the very bulky Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson-who somehow managed to get hired for this role in spite of his befuddlingly bad performance in SOUTHLAND TALES),tech lab geeks Bruce and Lloyd Masi "Heroes" Oka and Nate "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" Torrence) , ubiquitous jerkface David Koechner (you'll know him when you see him) and Terry "Everybody Hates Chris" Crews round out the bunch.

Can I just pause for a moment to comment on how freakishly white Dwayne Johnson's teeth are? He is the only person in the world whose smile has a "high beam" setting.

**STICK TO THE FACTS PLEASE****WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE TURNING ME OFF?****OH NOOO...SHALL I SING YOU A SONG?**

**DAISY daisy give me your annnswerrrrr ..................*

Where were we?
The Max Smart here, unlike his television counterpart, the late, great comically nimble Don Adams, is not a full agent.

Nope, he's a data analyst, interpreting data and presenting to it his higher-ups including THE CHIEF( Alan Arkin).From there field agents go out and face the threat, which may include shooting guns, blowing up stuff and/or getting shot at. In short, they have all the fun.

Today Max has taken the field agent test for the eighth time and he finally passed the exam.

We briefly see why he flunked the past seven tests, including a mercifully brief flashback with Steve Carrell in a fat suit (Groan). The fat suit bit was a real groaner to me.

I'm sick to the teeth of the whole fat suit phatnomena, whether it's a "Friends" 1980s Monica Gellar or DATE MOVIE's Allyson Hannigan (WHY ALLYGAN WHYYYYY?) or Tyra Banks. Let's take this moment in time to declare a FILMIC FAT SUIT MORATORIUM until The End of Time or I see NORBIT-whichever comes first.

But, as we'll see later, GET SMART is actually one of the most fat-friendly films in recent memory.

Max makes the cut, but he's told he's not going to be made into an agent. Why?

The Chief explains to Max that he's too good of analyst and he doesn't want to lose him.
Max is not happy.

As much as I appreciated the Endor-esque holographic globe and the whole production design of CONTROL's main , er, uh, Control Room, I would've enjoyed it if, as a story point, CONTROL was stuck in the late 1960s, their spy gadgets, their command center, all of these items would be horrendously out-of-date.

The reason given would be that the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security and the NSA and (should I go on...?) all were given the funding above and ahead of the pathetic CONTROL and the resolution of the plot would entail CONTROL getting more money and more presetige after saving the day.

It would've been great if CONTROL was so blind to the present that they were constantly surprised by the high tech gear of our modern life, like iPhones , DVDs and those paper bag Fandango puppets.

Oh, back the real plot...?

So, as you've seen from the trailer, CONTROL's security has been compromised and now the bad guys have the complete list of all of CONTROL's agents.
Now The Chief, must send in the one man who wasn't on that list- Max Smart.

Only Max, not an agent, and therefore not on the list, can go to Russia, do the thing that the plot is all about and save the day.

Accompanying the rookie is the experienced AGENT 99 (Anne Hathaway).

For all of you Hathaway nay-sayers that felt she is too young for the part , yes-you Ellen, 99 reveals to Max on the airplane ride over to Russia, that she is, in fact, older than she appears. She's like the Valerie Plame pariah of CONTROL, a seasoned agent who compromised her principals when she fell in love with another agent, yadda yadda yadda her cover was blown,she needed a new identity yadda yadda yadda and now she looks like Anne Hathaway.

Who are the bad guys? Thanks for asking.

British legend Terrence Stamp, best known to comic fandom as General Zod in the SUPERMAN movies and as BERNICE in PRISCILLA , QUEEN OF THE DESERT, turns in an elegant performance as KAOS baddie SIEGFRIED. Also with Siegfried is his lietuntant SHTARKER(Ken Davitian) and the muscles of KAOS-DALIP (Dalip Singh).
At 387 pounds, Dalip Singh is the East Indian Rondo Hatten for the twenty-first century and at 7'2" he's a full nine inches taller than Dwayne Johnson and the resolution to his fight with Max and 99 is a gas.
The Las Vegas Bureau of Tourism has asked me to note that Siegfried and Shtarker are not an internationally recognized Vegas lion taming act, but both characters are carry-overs from the show.

99 and Max enter Russian airspace in a spectacular free-fall flight fight engaging the dangerous Dalip, and then, once on the ground, the film slows down for a bit, which leads the way for my favorite scenes in the film.

Max and Agent 99 track down the villainous Ladislas Krstic (David S. Lee) to his opulent estate and do some undercover work. Max , dapper in his black tuxedo, is stunned by Agent 99 in a sparkly, slinky, slit to the thigh number.

Since they've been having the kind of love/hate relationship that you've come to expect in this kind of movie telling this kind of story, she eagerly accepts the invitation to dance with the ultra suave Krstic.

Not to be outdone, Max, ignoring the anorexic and snotty rich girls grabs the pleasingly plump and quite cute Lindsay Hollister. Together, Max and his partner(she's never properly named even in the credits) and 99 and Krstic do this passive-agressive four person dance number that's a joy to watch.

The movie audience that I saw GET SMART with cheered once at the end of the dance and then cheered again when Max's partner flipped off the skinny skanks.

Oh yeah, and I gotta mention, after the big dance off, Max and 99 go a-skulking through the stately manor and, at one point, when 99 realizes she just can't maneuver around in her stylish , yet highly constrictive ballroom dress, she just rr-r-r-r-r-r-r-rrips it right into a micro mini.

Wowsers Miss Hathaway! Wowsers!

It was just like that scene in the "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" episode "Flooded" where Buffy's at the bank trying to get a loan and this big demon guy comes in and starts tossing people around and Buffy goes to kick his demony derriere but she can't , cause she's wearing this long really tight skirt and so she just rr-r-r-r-r-rr-rips it into a really short miniskirt...!
That part of the movie just made feel funny, like when I used to climb the rope in gym class.

Oh where was I ?

Max finds the nuclear devices KAOS has stolen hidden in an enormous Russian bakery, meets up with Siegfried, escapes and performs his own on-site surgical strike. As the factory explodes around them, 99 & the Maxster face off against the hulking Dilpa.
Just when you think Smart is about to pummeled to death, he turns the tables on the brute, using the knowledge about his adversary he's picked up while monitoring KAOS conversations. I loved this bit.
In movies (and in real life), it's so easy to forget the "bad guys" are people too,and are beset by all same problems and insecurities we all have.
The empathy that Max shows really affects Dilpa as the plot thickens.

After his triumphant return to the US of A, Max is accused of being a double agent after Agent 23 does a clean sweep of the decimated bakery from two paragraphs up and can't find a single warhead or anything that would show that Max didn't just nearly demolish a perfectly good and perfectly legit bakery.

Unfortunately for Mr.Smart, Agent 99 can't back up his story because she was massively distracted in the aforementioned air vents when Max found the weapons of mass destruction.

Max, once again the loser,now in a high security prison, must escape, clear his name and defeat the bad guys.

Looking at Max's character arc, he basically goes back to where he was at the start of the film and and must re-invent himself into becoming the hero he was twenty minutes before.

There's a traitorous agent plot twist you can figure out a mile away, there's a plot to kill The President at the Disney Symphony Hall in downtown LA (for a Warner Brothers film, you sure hear the word "Disney" a lot), a lot of stuff blows up real good, Max saves the day, we get to see someone's bare(not Anne Hathaway's) butt, there's a cameo by "Get Smart" alum Bernie Kopell,another cameo by the famous Shoe phone, blink-and-you'll miss-it appearances by Cedric Yarbrough, Bill Murray,Kevin Nealon,Larry Miller, Ryan SeaCrest DSV and the awesome Patrick Warburton shows up as Hymie the Robot at the very end of this very silly movie.

GET SMART doesn't suffer from an over-abundance of characterization,story or high-falutin' Aaron Sorkin quality dialogue. If you came into the movie expecting SYRIANA or CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR with a shoe phone, alas, you'll be disappointed.

But, if you want to rest your butt, basking in the air conditioned glory that is the modern movie palace (note: May not be an actual palace) and have some good-natured laughs for just under two hours.

ADDENDUM for the FILM GEEKZ:
Remember the first Get Smart movie ? You don't?
It's called THE NUDE BOMB and it ,er, uh, bombed in theatres back in May 1980. I guess the producers didn't figure on THE EMPIRE STRIKing BACK.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Latest Headlines

Podcasts Coming Soon!

IESB.net Headlines

CinemaSkin Headlines

Audio Frequency Headlines

Reel Urban Headlines

Coming Soon!

Ahora Hollywood Headlines
Coming Soon!

debt finance refinance credit card replica watches insurance replica replica handbags debt personal replica water filter replica watches rugs replica water filter cigars refinance cigars rugs lingerie loan refinance cigars acne airline tickets lingerie replica insurance water filter cigars debt finance replica handbags air purifier water filter replica sunglsses replica lawn rugs college water filter acne diapers bankruptcy college rugs college finance college