Pictured: Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway in Get Smart.
Carell has risen quickly to the front ranks of Hollywood funnymen, in part because of his versatility. He is as likely to get laughs from taking a pratfall as he is by injecting comic irony into his line readings, and he’s managed to wring laughs out of even the thinnest material (Evan Almighty being a prime example). Onscreen he has had two specialties: the nice-guy nerd and the overbearing moron (a riff on his character in the TV sitcom The Office). His nice-guy personality; good-looking but not-too-handsome visage; and nerdish intelligence worked spectacularly well in The 40 Year Old Virgin, a movie so successful it singlehandedly spawned its own genre— and his antics as the idiot weatherman in Anchorman managed to steal every scene he was in. His Maxwell Smart is a combo of these two characters, and he veers back and forth as Get Smart moves through its paces.
The movie is a big-budget version of the Mel Brooks-Buck Henry 1960s secret-agent parody TV sitcom in which the top-secret CONTROL battled the nefarious KAOS. Many of the jokes from the show (the shoe phone, the descending phone booth and the cone of silence, for example) are kept for the movie—some with a wink, some with a spin and many just as they were in 1965. In the film, Carell’s Maxwell Smart is a nitpicky researcher who only gets to become a secret agent by default when KAOS hits CONTROL headquarters, leaving the boss (Alan Arkin) with little choice. Anne Hathaway plays Agent 99, Smart’s much more competent female equivalent who isn’t happy to be saddled with him. She’s given raccoon-eye makeup and slinky outfits, but lacks the luscious sexiness of the usual spy sidekick (she’s no Mrs. Peel or Mrs. Kensington) and there’s zero chemistry between she and Carell.
The movie’s real sex symbol is Dwayne Johnson (who no longer wishes to be addressed as The Rock, by the by) as Agent 23, who strides into headquarters with a confidence that is a turn-on for both the women and the men. The ladies want to bed him; the men want to emulate him. Johnson, who has slimmed down his wrestler’s oversized muscles for the role, looks great in his tailored suits and shares the movie’s most memorable moment —a full-on kiss with Carell. It’s not that the kiss itself is so surprising—this sight gag between two ‘macho’ guys has been used in movies and on TV over the last decade ad nauseam. It’s that Segal doesn’t have the characters immediately use mouthwash afterwards or do something excessively manly (as in those infamous commercials) that makes it refreshing and truly funny.
Nothing else in Get Smart delivers anything nearly as inventive. Oh, the scenes of modern-day Russia are appealing, the standard-issue plot has moments of hilarity as noted, several of the supporting cast members deliver a titter here and there but, really, after 40-plus years of these movies, isn’t it time to put the secret-agent parody out to pasture—at least for awhile?
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I don’t know what happened to M. Night Shyamalan as he was writing The Happening (pictured) . Maybe he was infected with the airborne toxin that makes people kill themselves in the film. Or maybe he just forgot to check his common sense before he went outside and started shooting the picture. Whatever happened wasn’t good because The Happening is his worst movie to date. If Shyamalan wanted to commit career suicide he couldn’t have chosen a more likely vehicle than this laugh-inducing ‘thriller.’
As in all Shyamalan’s pictures, the set-up is scary and promising—an apparently airborne toxin strikes a group of New Yorkers hurrying through Central Park on their way to work. People freeze for a moment and then, without hesitation, kill themselves. We next follow Mark Wahlberg as a science teacher in Pennsylvania racing with his wife (a horribly miscast Zooey Deschanel) and other terrified folks as they evacuate the city by train, trying to stay ahead of what appears to be a terrorist attack. But not long after the passengers are dropped off in the middle of nowhere, left to fend for themselves, the picture goes off the rails and never recovers.
As the ‘happening’ continues, Shyamalan gives us more and more people resorting to a plethora of ways to graphically commit suicide (hence the picture’s ‘R’ rating) —they shoot, hang and stab themselves as well as smash their faces in windows, lie down in front of lawnmowers and drive their cars into trees. By the time zookeepers are literally throwing themselves to the lions, one wants to toss Shyamalan’s movie into the den as well.
This loony film—which wastes Wahlberg, John Leguizamo, Betty Buckley (in a bizarre, ludicrous sequence) and many other talented actors—just gets sillier as the body count rises and the cast, making a leap of faith (a big one), are forced to speak Shyamalan’s tin-ear, high-falutin’ dialogue and follow through on his crazy notions. But The Happening does have an upside—and it’s a big one. This howler is so bad it’s destined to join the ranks of recent camp classics like the remake of The Wicker Man, Battlefield Earth and Swept Away, and provide future audiences hours of pleasurable laughter. I eagerly await the DVD and anticipate a delightful screening party.
Check out my archived reviews at www.windycitytimes.com or www.knightatthemovies.com. Readers can leave feedback at the latter Web site, where there is also ordering information on my book of collected film reviews, Knight at the Movies 2004-2006.