It was movie night, and Sharon^* chose the 2008 remake of Get Smart.

Steve Carell … Maxwell Smart / Agent 86
Anne Hathaway … Agent 99
Dwayne Johnson … Agent 23
Alan Arkin … The Chief
Terence Stamp … Siegfried
Terry Crews … Agent 91
David Koechner … Larabee
James Caan … The President
Bill Murray … Agent 13
Patrick Warburton … Hymie
Masi Oka … Bruce
Nate Torrence … Lloyd
Ken Davitian … Shtarker
David S. Lee … Ladislas Krstic
Dalip Singh … Dalip

Of all the returns to this series, I think that this was the best, and that includes the 1970s “The Nude Bomb”, which was really pretty lame.

The character is definitely not the late Don Adams’, but Steve Carell of Smart as an overeager crackerjack analyst who has a knack for screwing up generally works.

I think that the weakest of the performances were by Alan Arkin as the Chief, and Terence Stamp as Sigfried.

Arkin’s Chief is a hot-head, as opposed to the reserved, and aggrieved Chief of the late Ed Platt, and I think that had he been played closer to the original, it would have worked better.

Stamp, who makes a marvelous heavy, was simply wrong as Sigfried. He was too evil. The original Sigfried, played by Bernie Kopell, who had a cameo, was more of a sort of mirror image of Adams’ Smart.

I also miss the German accent.

For both of these, I blame the script writer more than anything else.

Anne Hathaway, as 99, did a very good job capturing the extreme competence of the character, as well as the playful sexiness of Barbera Feldon, from the original series.

Dwayne Johnson, aka “The Rock”, was surprisingly good, but more details would be spoilers.

It does touch on all the bits from the original, the cone of silence, “Missed it that by that much”, “Would you believe….”, “In KAOS, we don’t…”, he drives both the sunbeam and the Karmann Ghia, the shoe phone, “The old $$$$ trick”.

The core of the movie, as it was in the series, is the relationship between Max and 99.

There is real comic chemistry there, though the development of the romantic aspects of the relationship were too compressed.

This is not a surprise, as the development of the relationship in the original went from toleration, to amusement, to affection, to love over about 4 seasons, and 110 minutes is just not enough time.

Recommended

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.