This review is rather late in coming, so I feel it's fair to discuss the critical reception of Get Smart. Most reviewers have dismissed this film, basing much of their arguments on its dissimilarity with the old Don Adams TV show. (By the way, for you kids my age who didn't stay up for "Get Smart" on Nick at Nite, you'll remember Don Adams as the voice of Inspector Gadget.) And true, Get Smart the film lands somewhere between True Lies and Spy Hard on the Spy Spoof scale I have just invented, neither of which was anything like "Get Smart."

But if the film is only ostensibly an update of the old show, does that mean it's not funny? Certainly not. The main flaw of the film, as I hinted, is that it awkwardly attempts to be both a tongue-in-cheek action film and an all out, pratfall-heavy parody, two styles of comedy which do not mesh particularly well. It throws in some half-hearted satire as well ("Did you staple a paper to a guy's face? You know better than that! That's CIA shit!") Nonetheless, it is entertaining and occasionally even very funny.

For the film, Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell here) has been turned into a reformed overweight intelligence analyst who badly wants to be come a field agent. As his allusive name would indicate, he has the smarts and even the skills, but he is too good an analyst - not to mention a little accident-prone - for the Chief (Alan Arkin) to promote. But after CONTROL headquarters are compromised and attacked, they need all the agents they can get. Max is promoted and assigned with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) to get to the bottom of the attack.

Agent 99, originally a character for Max to bounce lines off of, has been updated to a post-feminism super agent who has to deal with the green Max. There's some business about the terrorist organization KAOS and lots of references to the old show, along with Terence Stamp as a mysterious villain, pretty much the same role he plays in this summer's Wanted.

The plot is soon lost in the film's numerous gags, or maybe that was just my lack of interest. Like the token love story between Max and 99, the terrorist stuff is as easily ignored as it probably was to write. What the film is really about is the jokes, a few of which fall flat but more than compensate for the utterly uninteresting story. There is little chemistry between Hathaway and Carell, but somehow this doesn't really matter until the denouement, which tends to drag where the love story is concerned.

The humor of the film is good ol' low-brow American humor, not much like the rehearsed-comedy-routine style of the TV Show (much of which would have been just as good on the radio) but good in its own way. Despite months of bad buzz and generally poor reviews, I was surprised midway through the film to find that I was enjoying myself and had been since it had started. So while Get Smart may be somewhat lacking in brains, providing for more than a few punny review titles, it gets by without them, just as Max always did on the old show.

In conclusion, would you believe me if I told you Get Smart is going to win 10 Oscars?

How about 2?

How about 1 thumb up and a handshake from Leonard Maltin?