The big-screen remake of the beloved 1960s TV series with Don Adams and Barbara Feldon is OK for kids, but did it have to have so much of what the Motion Picture Association of America calls "action violence?"
Material seemingly designed for silly comedy has been twisted to allow for baffling violent interludes.
I could feel the Monday night preview audience turning against "Get Smart" during a long sequence in which Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) is trying to figure out a complicated weapon and keeps sticking himself with tiny darts.
One of these misfires could — perhaps — have been amusing, but the third time we see the doofus secret agent piercing his face with the sharp objects is grotesquely unfunny (for a moment, the movie seems to have shifted into the torture horror movie mode of "Saw").
"Get Smart" also has killings that feel almost as brutal as similar moments in dramatic films.
Should we be happy that sexual equality in our culture means that the movie's beautiful leading lady Anne Hathaway takes almost as many punches as her co-star?
Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the way that Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) in the old "Avengers" TV series was smarter and faster than the man who made the mistake of fighting her.
The 1966 spy spoof "Modesty Blaise" also featured a heroine (Monica Vitti) so skilled in martial arts that no one
The brutalization of Hathaway's Agent 99 seems like a post-feminist regression to me.
"Get Smart" goes off on another unpleasant tangent by introducing nuclear terrorism as a plot point in the second half of the film.
The old TV series existed in an alternate universe of slapstick villains, but the movie dredges up post-9/11 fears that dampen the laughs.
It's simply not funny to have Maxwell racing to save the president and his guests from a nuclear weapon that is set to go off in the middle of a gala concert in Los Angeles.
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