This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: August 12, 2008 - "Get Smart" was a witty but minor TV comedy series created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry at a time (1965) when television and movie screens were overrun with secret agents and their preposterous gadgets. The humor was broad and, like most TV comedies of its time, concentrated more on the recurring foibles of the main characters - agent Maxwell Smart (Don Adams), his patient supervisor the Chief (Edward Platt) and his female counterpart Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) - than on the complexities of plot. Agent 86 never saw a case that couldn't be solved in less than 30 minutes.
Although the show contributed a few catchphrases to our culture, I don't think I could recall a specific episode in any detail. But then I probably haven't seen one in more than 30 years - and I'd be willing to bet that most people younger than 30 haven't seen the show at all and recall its star Adams more as the voice of the animated Inspector Gadget than as the incompetent Smart.
But let's call this a state of innocence, as it seems to work in favor of the surprisingly well-received movie adaptation. Expanding on the spies-vs.-bad-guys theme, the new film takes Smart and 99 to locations that the budget-and-time-crunched series never reached, offers a supervillain in the form of Terence Stamp, and a pseudo-Hitchcockian finale set at the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Center in Los Angeles, but the core of the film remains as modest as any random episode of the TV series: The foolish (and foolishly self-confident) hero Smart, given a near-perfect incarnation by Steve Carell, bungles his way through one crisis after another, aided by Anne Hathaway, Alan Arkin and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, again showing a gift for self-parody that slipped through the cracks of "Get Real" and his wrestling career.
Directed by Peter Segal, better known for a string of Adam Sandler films, it's not much to look at, but if you accept that its intentions are no more than to re-create the modest ambitions of a creative but rather silly TV series, it coasts by rather well.