GET SMART – peter segal – 7.0 / 10

Despite a few scenes of stupid humor better suited to Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey, Get Smart is, for the most part, pretty clever. Take for instance how they get around the problem of Anne Hathaway and Steve Carrell’s obvious and distracting difference in age. Hathaway’s Agent 99 explains that she had to have massive plastic surgery to reconstruct her face when her cover was blown and before she went under the knife she asked the surgeons to take a few years off as well. Her ‘real’ age in the film is closer to the mid-forties like Carrell. And then, instead of just leaving it at that, the film continues to talk about how 99 should hurry up and have kids because her uterus is drying out. So even if this was simply a dodge to explain lopsided casting, the film had the good sense to embrace it and make jokes about it throughout the film.

Additionally, the overall theme of the film is stated by Carrell’s Max early in the film when, while delivering an intelligence briefing, he tells the gathered agents to always remember that the people they are trying to stop might be terrorists but they are also people too. And later in the film, when Max and 99 encounter a seemingly unstoppable mountain of a man, it is Max’s knowledge of the man’s problems with his wife that leads to a détente and Max and 99’s eventual escape. In fact, the only thing that really decides the fate of Siegfried, the man baddie in the film, is that the huge terrorist decides he likes Max better than Siegfried.

While that’s not the deepest or most insightful message ever, it is certainly one worth reiterating and certainly not one I expected to find in what has mostly been billed as a stupid comedy along the lines of You Don’t Mess With The Zohan.