"Get Smart" does have Anne Hathaway, whose elegant visual lines and cool way with a retort as Agent 99 bear comparison with the show's Barbara Feldon. Better, it has Alan Arkin as the chief of top-secret spy organization CONTROL, updating Ed Platt's original with dry belligerence. Arkin, who gets off the movie's single funniest line (it involves a swordfish) continues his post-"Little Miss Sunshine" late-career roll; simply put, every summer tent pole should have him.
The problem is the script by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember ("Failure to Launch"), which mistakes boilerplate pee-pee jokes for the enthusiastic toilet humor that was Brooks's later specialty. (When in doubt, someone here always seems to get a paintball to the crotch.) Another offender is Richard Pearson's stop-and-start editing, consistently halting the comic momentum before it can build to real lunacy. The calculus for each scene is unwavering - TV show reference, slam-bang action, wisecrack - and it wears thin fast.
To his credit, Carell doesn't go for a Don Adams impression. His Maxwell Smart is more unlucky than bumbling, a former fatty who just wants to be the best field agent in the bureau, and damned if that miniature crossbow doesn't keep firing into his face.
That said, the movie errs by turning Max into a figure of hangdog sympathy: The 40 Year Old Virgin with a shoe phone. What's missing is the fatuousness that made Adams's original so oddly endearing and that was mined more successfully by Rowan Atkinson in the sloppier (and funnier) "Johnny English." The joke of the character is that no one takes Max seriously but himself.
But "Get Smart" takes everything a little too seriously, including the warmed-over plot about criminal KAOS mastermind Siegfried (Terence Stamp, looking mortified) planning to blow up Los Angeles with hijacked Chechnya nukes. (The TV series' Siegfried, Bernie Kopell, gets a cameo in the film.)
