MOVIE REVIEW - Get Smart

This is the summer of rehashing old ideas and bringing them back to the movies, and this week it's Get Smart! I have to admit, I had a lot of reservations about this project. I am not a huge Get Smart TV fan, but I was nervous this could be embarrassingly bad if handled improperly.

Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway and a bevy of stars and interesting cameo's star in the first installment of obviously a series of movies based on TV's 1960's secret agent spoof Get Smart. If you're a little too young to know Get Smart from television, it was created by the immortal Mel Brooks. It was intended to lampoon James Bond movies that were brand new at the time, and to make light of the cold war that was in high gear. The show was popular for years in it original run, and has lived in reruns for decades now.

Don Adams was Agent "86" and Barbara Feldon "99." And thanks to this new movie they still are and will always be. To this movies credit, it pays homage to the TV show in many subtle ways. It borrows the idea, but not the performances. Carell and Hathaway do not spend two hours imitating Adams and Feldon, and that makes it work. Maxwell Smart, a bumbling secret agent has been slightly reinvented, and Agent 99 has been completely overhauled to bring her up to date. That is the best decision this movie could have made.

Another terrific twist is, Get Smart is more comfortable being entertaining rather than funny. It's a comedy dressed in an action movies costume. And that too works! They don't try to force mediocre humor down our throats, but rather make a movie that is amusing and fun to watch. The makers of this Get Smart had a plan, stuck to it and made it their own without ruining the franchise that is so golden.

Get Smart is not without problems. Get Smart is a little too long for the kind of movie it is, 15 less minutes would have been much more in the long run. Also a couple of quick 9th grade sophomoric moments don't make it a better movie, just a more juvenile one at times. Should have been written out. But it doesn't destroy the flick at all.

Purists may not like the new Get Smart. You have to except that it's not the TV show, and it has been updated. Overall this is good clean summer fun. Get Smart - actually IS smart for reinventing itself. And Oscar winner? No way, but a fun summer date night at the movies.