Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Get Smart is the funniest movie I’ve seen in a year. It’s hilarious from start to finish, and I say this as a person who watches a lot of movies.¹ Reviews have been mixed, and I really don’t understand why. Am I missing something here? Are my standards slipping? Am I becoming an idiot? It’s the kind of thing that you don’t typically notice in yourself. If you take three crazy people who each think they’re Jesus and put them together in one room, it doesn’t really help matters. They still think they’re all Jesus. But I digress.

Like many a young dork of my generation, I owe a great debt to Nick at Nite. It allowed me to see all the best shows of yesteryear without having to watch the crap that undoubtedly surrounded them during their original broadcasts. Imagine some parallel universe where you get to watch House without suffering through the indignity of acknowledging The War at Home’s existence. That is what Nick at Nite offered me, and that is where I first saw the original Get Smart. I’m sure that if I watched it as an adult I’d be better able to appreciate the Cold War jabs, and probably marvel at a certain degree of sexism.² In my youth, however, I saw only the slapstick, the funny accents, and the insane gadgets (the Cone of Silence, a phone that is a shoe, and whatever else they came up with that week).

This is not to say that the show didn’t have its nuances. Get Smart taught me that there was such a thing as comedic timing, and that if you had it, if you were really precise about it and said something in exactly the right way at exactly the right moment, you could magically make normal into funny. Yes, Max would accidentally slam his head into a piece of exposed pipe just overhead, and that was cute, but it was his restrained suffering after the fact, the quiet struggle to hold it together and appear competent, that was truly funny. “I meant to do that!”

Suffice to say that Steve Carell is the perfect heir to Don Adams’s legacy. If you are cool enough to have been a fan of his since The Daily Show,³ you know that he is the sort of man who can make the word “okay” funny. No, really. There is a scene in Get Smart where he makes the word “okay” funny. You’ll know it when you see it.

In the wrong hands, this version of Maxwell Smart could have been boring, unlikable, and unfunny, but luckily, we have Steve Carell. I can’t picture anyone but Steve Carell in the lead role, to be honest. It’s not just the vague resemblance to Adams, which a lot of the weirder reviews point to with inexplicable disdain. It’s the attitude. It’s the perfect delivery and the tenderness and vulnerability that rest just below Maxwell Smart’s confident exterior.

As for the rest, Anne Hathaway, Alan Arkin, Dwayne Johnson, and Terence Stamp are all, you know, fine, but they’re really just props to move Carell along. My only real complaint is that, this being a summer flick, it inevitably comes down to a dramatic race to stop a nuclear bomb. I would have rather seen the climax take the form of a battle of wits between Max and Siegfried, but I suppose you can’t have everything. This one is definitely worth seeing in the theaters.

1. More than the average person, but less than a crazy person. ∧
2. The original Agent 86 was an incompetent man who routinely fell into his victories, while Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) did all the heavy lifting. It makes no that she’d be the perpetual second banana, especially in today’s gender conscious society. ∧
3. Which I am. Incidentally, have you seen the interviews he does when he comes back as a guest to promote a new movie? They are hilarious. ∧