In Mel Brooks’ classic ‘60s espionage farce, comedian Don Adams played Maxwell Smart, a bumbling, slightly pompous spy who, in the tradition of Inspectors Clouseau and Gadget or Hong Kong Fooey, always managed to get the job done, but only through the judicious assistance of his ridiculously hot, super smart and inexplicably devoted sidekick Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon).
There have, down the years, been spin-offs and TV revivals so we should not be taken aback to see a big budget ($180 million) summer movie, nor should we be surprised to see Steve Carell stepping into Adams’ telephone shoes. The 40 year-old Virgin star, having perfected a dignified stooge persona inThe Office and The Daily Show, ought to have been a perfect match.
Sadly, the people who wrote the screenplay, Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember (the same evildoers that gave us Failure To Launch) have invested so much energy in re-tooling the series for the go-go noughties, there’s hardly any of the original concept left. Worse, they don’t seem to understand the most fundamental rule of comedy: you can’t team a straight man up with another straight man, even when that man happens to be a woman.
The alchemy is all out of whack here. Take Steve Carell’s agent, who occasionally falls over but who, in defiance of the ironic title, is actually quite smart. Anne Hathaway’s 99 is still a super spy who papers over her partner’s mistakes but the mischievous gleam that came from knowing he was an idiot is gone.