Talk about most American television shows – classic or modern – and I draw a blank. When Entertainment Tonight announces the discovery of lost “Gilligan’s Island” episodes or outtakes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” I wonder what the fuss is about. Actually the only TV series I remember seeing as a kid is Burt Reynolds’s “Dan August” – it lasted a single season (1970).
This deficiency, in hindsight, appears to be a small slice of good fortune. It has freed me from a required obesiance to every TV-to-film adaptation and has barred me from membership in that burgeoning cult of scrutinizers who pick apart films, searching for any deviation from the tiny screen.
Artistic quality, after all, is not determined by the source of the work, but rather by how the source is represented. Or in less obscure terms, our admiration for Michaelangelo’s David should not diminish if archaeological evidence points to a bow-legged, pot-bellied patriach.
Which brings us to “Get Smart,” the latest release from director Peter Segal, starring Steve Carrell.
The original “Get Smart,” a popular TV show created by Mel Brooks which ran in the 60s, was a parody of the spy genre, especially the Bond series. It featured the tales of secret agent Maxwell Smart.
Smart, an employee of espionage agency CONTROL, was involved in saving the world from the sinister machinations of KAOS. He was also involved with Agent 99, his sexy, efficient colleague.
The series eventually spawned 1980’s “The Nude Bomb” and 1989’s made-for-TV “Get Smart, Again!”
In evaluating the latest version, it is necessary to divorce the film from its origins. It is a disappointing farce, but not for lack of trying to please. Like a fish desperately flapping fins on deck, “Get Smart” founders in its attempts to generate laughs.
Carrell is what keeps the film from running aground. He is unflappable during gags bringing to mind Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Pather films. Some of the stunts do work, though after a while they become rather overkilled and predictable. Wouldn’t two arrows piercing Smart’s face have been enough?
I did enjoy Terrence Stamp’s turn as a quirky villian, though most of the supporting cast – Alan Arkin, Anne Hathaway and Dwayne Johnson – brought the bare minimum to their roles.
Segal might have believed he made Carrell the film’s quarterback, but the only game that got played was catch – each comic toss to the ensemble had them returning it like a faithful poodle.
The filmmakers carbon-copied the initial premise, so instead of an offspring, they have delivered a clone. This gives the film an anachronistic feel. The result is a bad spoof and an even worse satire.
For a parody to be successful, it mush have an object in mind, one which is easily identifiable to the audience. This means, unlike most genres, the spoof is married to its particular milieu – “Superhero Movie” would have been meaningless ten years ago. Those watching it now, however, can easily make the connection to “X-Men,” “Spider-Man” and “Superman.”
In caricaturing Bond, it is useful to remember that Brooks worked during the Cold War. “Get Smart” made fun of Bond’s reliance on incredulous gadgets, his Casanova reputation – “Mixing business and girls! Mixing thrills and girls! Mixing danger and girls!” The spy films, like the Westerns before them, had divvied the world into an us against them, good versus evil. Audiences could afford to laugh with Brooks because the alternative was less bearable to think about.
Spy films are now unfashionable. While the Bourne series and the new Bond are acclaimed, they deal less with espionage than with the characters reacting to the chaotic world around them. “Get Smart” fails to recognize that the epoch has changed and so it carries on laughing when no one is on the joke.
Moreover, as satire of our government’s response to the terrorism, the internal squabling among agencies and the current emphasis on technological intelligence at the expense of human, the film is positively mediocre.
It has no point of view and arrives at no point – the president is a philistine, his veep is overbearing and the administration amateurish. Isn’t it time we resign these tired types to the recycling bin of cinematic cliches?
Compare the war room scene here with those of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.” While Kubrick lampooned an inept government held hostage, it nonetheless cut deep because it showed that nuclear war could be the result of a single act of irrationality. “Get Smart,” by contrast, just seems petty.
“Get Smart” fails not because it is entirely unfunny, which it isn’t, but because the filmmakers were unsure of whether it should say something Important or be merely a comedy. It is possible to do both; it is obvious Segal cannot rise to that level of inspiration.
—-Contact Freke Ette at [email protected]