Get Smart

Get Smart is an adaptation of a hit American television series of the ‘60s, satirising the world of secret agents, as conceptualised by Mel Brooks. It stars well-known comic Steve Carrell as the bumbling agent Maxwell Smart and Hathaway as his partner Agent 99, while Arkin is their long-suffering Chief.

All three put in their best to make us laugh at secret agents — listening over snatches of conversations from Russia to China over everything from electric border fences to the merits of muffins, and agonising over what qualifies as real terror in a paranoid world.

However, the problem is that this isn’t the Sixties. At a time when laughing at the Government runs the late-night talk show business and there are dozen odd spoofs of James Bond, Get Smart is caught in a gentler period when people from Smart to the President bungled but generally got it right. (And we are talking nuclear here.)

The film pulls its punches, going just so far and no further, and leaving us wishing for at least one scene where when Smart trips, he actually falls.

Of course, it hurts that the Great Khali, credited here as Dalip Singh, is the usual bodyguard-cum-moronic Indian driver of the goon who can barely string together a sentence. (No, we refuse to acknowledge the consequences of him having to actually utter words apart from kebab.)

Considering what the straight-faced Carrell is capable of pulling off (Little Miss Sunshine, with Arkin just one example), Get Smart needed to get just a little bit smarter.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com