In ‘Get Smart’ Lifeless Retread, Steve Carell Can’t Fill Don Adams’ Shoe

HollywoodChicago.com — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:23:43 -0700

Rating: 2.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Observing the new “Get Smart” film, which is based on the 1960s TV sitcom of the same name, is to note how much has changed since the Cold War ended.

KAOS and CONTROL – the U.S. and Russian spy agencies that square off in the movie – seem like relics of another era. In this age of homeland security and unlimited government wiretapping, it’s difficult to create fictional comedy that can compete with real-life absurdity.

Anne Hathaway (left) stars as Agent 99 and Steve Carell stars as Maxwell Smart in “Get Smart”.
Photo credit: Tracy Bennett

The film version of “Get Smart” lives up to that truth. Combining dull action-movie elements, badly cast movie stars and an uncomfortable romance, the film has forgotten all about its TV roots and most of the humor.

Played by Steve Carell, Maxwell Smart is a Russian interpreter and communications administrator in the secret government spy agency CONTROL.

The chief (Alan Arkin) wants Smart to stay in the administration even though he longs to join spies like Agent 23 (Dwayne Johnson) and work in the field.

After KAOS – a rival Russian agency – infiltrates and wrecks the CONTROL offices, Smart is promoted to field agent and partnered with super-spy Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway). Their mission is to find out who’s behind KAOS and identify their evil plans.

Steve Carell stars as Maxwell Smart (left) and Anne Hathaway stars as Agent 99 in “Get Smart”.
Photo credit: Warner Bros.

This takes them to the heart of Moscow. Thinking a Russian bakery is a KAOS front for nuclear weapons, Smart and 99 plant explosives and barely escape.

Steve Carell stars as Maxwell Smart in “Get Smart”.
Photo credit: Tracy Bennett

When the wrecked building turns up nothing, the wily Russians then travel to Los Angeles. Following them there, Smart and 99 must confront their rivals one last time and save the world.

Steve Carell is clearly not up to the challenge of filling Don Adams’ phone shoe as Maxwell Smart. The comedy he delivers is mostly cruel and has none of the snap or silliness of Adams’ razor-sharp interpretation.

Hathaway – who was cooler and more subtly amusing in “The Devil Wears Prada” – is completely out of her element when handling weaponry and practicing martial arts. She and Carell have less chemistry than a baking-soda volcano and their age difference is awkwardly apparent when they attempt romance.

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It seemed the filmmakers never saw one episode of the TV series when formulating the plot.

The film version tries to shoehorn reminders of several action movies – the James Bond series, “Mission Impossible,” “True Lies,” “Silver Streak” and even “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (among others) – but oddly distances itself from its primary and funnier television source.

This film is just another based-on-a-TV-show miscue that wastes a decent comic opportunity on let’s-blow-things-up trivialities. The legacy of “Get Smart,” audiences everywhere and ultimately the great Don Adams all deserve better.

“Get Smart,” which stars Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Arkin, Terence Stamp, Bill Murray and Ryan Seacrest, opened everywhere on June 20, 2008.

By PATRICK McDONALD
Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com
pat@hollywoodchicago.com

‘Rendition’ a Mediocre Message Movie With What Should Be Self-Evident Politics

HollywoodChicago.com — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:10:03 -0700

AUSTIN, Texas – German writer Franz Kafka meets the war on terror in “Rendition,” which is a message movie with what one would consider a self-evident message: torture is bad. We live in a political climate, though, where that isn’t self-evident.

Reese Witherspoon and Peter Sarsgaard in “Rendition”.
Photo courtesy of IMDb
While “Rendition” is timely and invigoratingly noble, it doesn’t really have any perspective. It’s to torture what “Amistad” was to slavery. It’s a $30 million AP brief.

Directed by Gavin Hood (“Tsotsi”), the movie assumes a “Babel”-like structure of tangling Hollywood stars with relative unknowns in intermingling storylines. The inciting story involves an Egyptian expatriate – Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) – who is detained while coming home to Chicago to his pregnant wife, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon).

Unlike Josef K. (a character in Kafka’s novel “The Trial”), he is told his charges: a phone call he received in the opening scene was from a terrorist who was involved in a suicide bombing. This explosion was meant to kill Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor) who interrogates at a secret detention prison.

Surviving the explosion was Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal). He’s a new CIA man who must now oversee Fawal as he tortures Anwar.

Meryl Streep in “Rendition”.
Photo courtesy of IMDb
Like Josef K., there’s the ambiguous possibility that Anwar might have in fact designed the bomb. While Isabella lobbies her old boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard) – now an aide to a senator (Alan Arkin) who literally has a copy of the Bill of Rights framed behind his desk – Anwar’s release is continually denied by Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep).

Streep is given the film’s most thankless job in playing Whitman, whose specific government position is never mentioned but is apparently omnipotent and without oversight. Her character and the movie’s screenplay don’t have the energy to call the Geneva Convention antiquated (as some pundits have).

With her mild Southern accent, she touts “7,000 people alive in central London tonight” including her granddaughter because of rendition-gathered intelligence. Steep plays Whitman as someone who lives and breathes Dick Cheney’s “One Percent Doctrine”.

Written by Kelley Sane, the script was on a 2005 black list of Hollywood’s best never-produced screenplays. It isn’t bad.

Omar Metwally (center) in “Rendition”.
Photo courtesy of IMDb
Its only dramatic mistake is a sore-thumb subplot involving Fawal’s daughter (Zineb Oukach) shacking up with an Islamic fundamentalist (Moa Khouas). What seems comparatively insignificant for too much screen time builds too late into flashy, “Watchmen”-like narrative gymnastics.

The writing isn’t into the prospect of defending some supposed necessity for extraordinary rendition or torture, which is understandable – after all – because it’s torture. Though laws changed in 2006, the Bush Administration briefly defined the act as anything less painful than organ failure.

While I might be mistaken, I’m not really sure Bush’s name is mentioned in the movie. Clinton’s name is evoked in the spirit of bipartisanship as the first instigator of extreme rendition.

By badly trying to present “both sides,” “Rendition” becomes ashamed of its righteousness. Gyllenhaal and Witherspoon are each given one yelling scene Arkin’s Sen. Hawkins and Sarsgaard’s Alan Smith represent the average citizen’s complacency even as they morally stick with a sinking-ship status quo.

Reese Witherspoon in “Rendition”.
Photo courtesy of IMDb
The movie mistakes passivity for objectivity and defeated characters for nuance. This makes for some tepid drama. “Rendition” certainly can’t address the entertainment industry’s glorification and obfuscation of torture.

As polemic, I can’t deny that “Rendition” really does work. At my screening, the largest cheers came when Smith tells Whitman: “Maybe I should send you a copy of the Constitution.” Regardless of its own ambivalence, the movie is ultimately on the side of the angels.

The reason torture suddenly came back to the bargaining table in the national dialogue isn’t just because of Sept. 11 and fear.

It’s because of people’s lack of imagination to other people’s pain thresholds. If it has to be a $30 million AP dispatch to illustrate that ignorance can deprive anyone of their most inalienable rights, that’s certainly brave.

By Shane Hazen
Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com