Early reviews are out for this weekend’s Get Smart. It was to offer the only competition to Mike Meyers’ Love Guru as a rival comedy, but its not looking positive. Guru itself has been met with skeptical eyes presuming it was just another over the top Meyer’s character, but with such scathing review of Get Smart, it might be looking like the lesser of two evils.
The overriding factor here is that the filmmakers — this would include ham-fisted director Peter Segal and the punchless writing team of Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember — don’t know what the joke is. Is this a spoof of an old TV series? Is this a spoof of Ian Fleming? Is this a Carell vehicle? No one seems to know, as familiar lines crop up in the wrong places and the timing of gags, so indelibly rendered in the series, misfires on nearly every occasion.
Ouch!
I was really looking forward to this. Forget that I am a big Carell fan. Or that I find Anne Hathaway irresistable both physically and in charm. But this series is a beloved part of my youth. This was the ONLY show I watched with my dad that wasn’t a Western or Song & Dance (or both). I was raised on the bumbling good natured witless Maxwell Smart and his dashingly capable sidekick beauty Agent 99.
Casting could not have been better for these roles. How could it fail?
I hope this reviewer just had a bad day. Or that at best it isn’t as bad as he is making this out to be.
I have such high hopes for this film.
