Un-'Smart,' to the Max

What I remember most about "Get Smart" weren't the gadgets, but the winning naivete of its central character, Maxwell Smart.

He was a proto-Clouseau, a bumbler touched by grace, whose blundering interference would defeat the intricate and sinister schemes of the evil masterminds arrayed against him.

At the end of an episode, CONTROL agent Max would watch another KAOS madman hauled away in irons and say, with the complete sincerity of a moral bumpkin, "If only he'd used his powers for good."

I always loved that about Max. Unlike, say, the coolly jaded Cold Warriors of "The Man From U.N.C.L.E," Max was always freshly surprised at the willingness of an opponent to commit himself to pure evil.

So, anyone seeking to take up the mantle of Max would have to do so with an air of clueless innocence.

Somebody, say, who could convincingly play a 40-year-old virgin.

Enter Steve Carell, a potentially brilliant bit of casting that made this attempt to build a movie franchise around a mouldering television series more promising than most (and it is better than "McHale's Navy").

And it might have worked, too, had "Get Smart" simply dropped Carell into Don Adams' tapered suit. For the big screen, though, writers have obviously tried to pump Max up and flesh him out, giving him a backstory that makes him more dimensional but somehow less appealing.

In "Get Smart," he's a career nerd/analyst trying to make the jump to field agent. When he finally passes his field test, he's paired with superagent 99 (Anne Hathaway), who makes it clear that she resents her inexperienced new partner. Nonetheless, Chief (Alan Arkin) sends them to Russia to find stolen nuclear material.

"Get Smart" never gets a handle on its new Max. The movie gets the biggest laughs out of pure incompetence - Max repeatedly wounding himself with a mini-crossbow, or making an Indy-style swing to safety and smacking into a brick wall.

At other times, Max is incongruously slick - for instance, looking like T.J. Hooker during a fistfight on a speeding SUV's rooftop, getting off a perfect hipshot with a semi-automatic weapon.

These unexpected demonstrations of prowess help position Max as a suitable romantic match for Agent 99, but this is the movie's least successful component. Watching them in lip-lock is like watching Hathaway make out with an older male relative.

Perhaps the series will find its footing in sequels. Patrick Warburton makes a late-game appearance, and his famous stoicism seems right for his proposed role as a robot agent. *

Produced by Andrew Lazar, Charles Roven, Alex Gartner and Michael Ewing, directed by Peter Segal, written by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember, music by Trevor Rabin, distributed by Warner Bros.