Get Smart

Rating:

* * * *

Verdict:

Would you believe that it's actually quite funny?

It shouldn't work - after all, the only useful thing that big-screen remakes of classic TV shows do is prove why they were never meant to be films in the first place  - but

Get Smart

really does.

Sure, it tries way too hard to be something other than a rejig of the 60s spy spoof TV series, like a slapstick

Bourne

film, at which point it jettisons its easy wit and becomes just another action comedy. Albeit one with Carell showing his particular talent for screaming in pain.

Also, it has too many other agents whose numbers aren't 86 or 99 crowding up the place.

But

Get Smart

the movie is as funny in its own way as

Get Smart

the TV show was.

And that rider of "in its own way" is the key.

It references the original Mel Brooks creation frequently - Steve Carell's Max passes an exhibition from the  shoe-phone days of CONTROL on his way to his office through all those sliding doors.

But while this allows itself a few Brooksian absurdist gags, it's not trying to out-spoof the spoof.

It sets itself in contemporary post-9/11 - or post-

24

- times, with its plot of a fiendish arms dealer  and his plan to be  market leader in supplying nukes to the world's terrorists via a little demo in downtown LA.

Before Max can save the day he has to get out from behind the desk where he works as a thorough research analyst delivering slumber-inducing reports to the Chief and his colleagues.

But with mounting crises at the agency, Max is thrust into the field and partnered with tough-but-tasty cookie Agent 99 (Hathaway) who doesn't think much of her new greenhorn offsider. He's increasingly desperate to prove his spy mettle -  or at least stop harming himself with the gadgets the guys at the office give him.

Its plot is as predictable as any old episode but it's the quick, tangential, ridiculous fun it has getting there that makes it. It's a movie which both references Kubrick's

Dr Strangelove

in one scene and goes for a gross sickbag sight gag in another. They both work, hilariously.

So, too, do the leading couple. Carell might resemble Don Adams' original Max in appearance but he gives him his own strait-laced sense of the ridiculous, while Hathaway's 99 is a fine, feisty foil.

They help

Get Smart

rise  above some pretty low expectations. Though unfortunately they've probably made the world safe for yet more classic TV remakes we're not sure we wanted in the first place.

Russell Baillie

Cast:

Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Arkin, Terence Stamp

Director:

Peter Segal

Running time:

111 mins

Rating:

PG (violence)