Get Smart: Critic Reviews

Written and directed with efficiency, cheer, and a refreshing lack of look-how-meta-clever-we-are egotism, the movie references just enough of the original touchstones and punchlines to please those who lived it the first time.

Get Smart is made up of feeble and funny jokes, brand actors and enough special effects to give you some bang for your summertime buck.

This is a spy comedy which seems entirely unaware of the new genre of Jack Bauer or Jason Bourne, and instead looks more like a Roger Moore-era 007 knockoff.

It can't decide whether it wants to be a thrilling action movie or a quirky comic spoof. The elements seem in conflict, rather than seamlessly blended.

As I say: darned funny! Weightless as froth, forgettable as dew, but pretty darned funny.

Get Smart, version 2008, surrounds skilled, likable players, and a handful of solid belly laughs with $80 million worth of formulaic summer-movie mediocrity. A lot of things explode, but the movie never detonates.

A pleasant surprise.

Although Carell is never less than likable, he's funnier in any random scene of The Office. Here's hoping some misguided team doesn't try to turn that series into a quick grab at box-office bucks 40 years from now.

Rather than the laugh a minute promised by old comedies, Get Smart generates approximately one laugh per hour, and I can't remember either one.

Chipper, energetic and unimaginatively plotted re-do.

Instead of the show's wacky, slapstick tone, Get Smart presents itself as an action-filled spy movie that just happens to be really funny. And for the most part, it succeeds.

By movie's end, we can imagine spending some more time with Agents 86 and 99, and liking it.

Get Smart is likable and very funny -- at least a two-to-one ratio of excellent gags to clunkers -- but it's not, for better or worse, Get Smart.

It's funny, exciting, preposterous, great to look at, and made with the same level of technical expertise we'd expect from a new Bond movie itself. And all of that is very nice, but nicer still is the perfect pitch of the casting.

Missed it by that much. Actually, the new version of Get Smart misses by a fair-size margin. It's too bad. It's just trying to give us a good time at the retroplex.

I often wondered if the filmmakers weren't trying to fix something that isn't broken.

All that's missing is the spirit and the anarchic humor of the sitcom created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. The result is an overdressed, carefully stitched scarecrow of a comedy.

With comic resources like this, Get Smart should have been a hoot, not just satisfactory. Missed it by that much.

A little more unabashed silliness might have made Get Smart a better movie. As is it's a chuckly comfort-food film that you neither love nor hate, serviceable fare for a warm summer daze.

Get Smart is by no means a great movie. Would you believe . . . a good movie? Would you believe . . . a passable couple of hours with a decent laugh thrown in here and there?

I didn't mind the movie, though many of its effects struck me as laboriously overproduced.

A lot of the comedy seems to have been lost in the translation.

Would you believe the new version of the '60s spy spoof Get Smart, starring Steve Carell, isn't awful -- like almost all TV-to-movie transfers -- but instead, that it's actually pretty funny (if overlong and overproduced)?

Surely after the Speed Racer fiasco, Warner Brothers was ready to say 'sayonara' to lame 1960s TV adaptations. But plainly there wasn't time for the studio to, ahem, Get Smart about that.

The truth is that Get Smart is one of the year's sharper comedies, and if it contains any WMDs, that stands for 'wit of major delight.'