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BY MAGGIE SCOTT

When you’ve got the current big cheese of comedy, Steve Carell, as your leading man and consulting work from comedy writing legends Buck Henry and Mel Brooks, there’s no way director Peter Segal’s big screen version of TV’s spy-parody “Get Smart” is going to miss blockbuster box office by that much.

Maxwell Smart and the spy spoof world of CONTROL (the good guys) and KAOS (the bad guys) were introduced to the world in 1965. Don Adams perfectly embodied the buttoned-up agent; Barbara Feldon purred her way through danger as Max’s svelte, sympathetic sidekick; and Edward Platt as the flummoxed Chief pulled many a disapproving long face.

Not so much reincarnated as retooled, the characters are updated for the post-Cold War, post-feminist movement world. Alan Arkin is more assertive and hands-on as the Chief; Anne Hathaway is more hard-edged and no-nonsense as Agent 99 and Carell, would you believe, is Carell. The old Max had a deadpan cluelessness. The new Max has a gleam in his eye that tells you he’s in on the joke on himself.

The story is a lickety split hodgepodge of sight gags, practical jokes and slapstick pranks, some more side-splitting than others. Besides sorting out his feelings for the gorgeous 99 who is miffed at having to pair up with such a newbie, Max must contend with the haughty hijinks of mega-agent 23 (Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson). Agent 23 likes to call his losing opponents in paintball battles things like maxi pad and Chatty Cathy.

Agent 23 is old school brute force. The Chief believes that “intelligence doesn’t come from satellites but from men with hunches.” Max believes you get the upper hand by treating your enemies like human beings who “risk the carbs” like everybody else. When CONTROL HQ is ransacked and the “chatter” indicates that renegades from Chechnya are helping KAOS operative Mr. Siegfried (Terence Stamp) stockpile nukes, it’s time to promote Max from analyst to Agent 86.

Armed with gadgets like exploding dental floss and a souped up Swiss Army knife, 99 and 86 begin the mission with a bit of a competitive chip on their shoulders; with 99 clearly outpacing Max in the area of saving their lives from threats like a gargantuan assassin with a face like the head of an Easter Island statue.

Max gets some sense socked into him by 99 on more than one occasion, but gradually he builds on innate skills, like expertly starting and stopping the flow of urine to avoid detection while eavesdropping in the men’s room. Carell and Hathaway are put through the wringer carrying off zany battles on their way to thwarting KAOS from detonating a nuke at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and potentially depriving the world of all that, sorry about that, “razor sharp political advice.”

My advice: your mission, which you must chose to accept, is to go see Get Smart.

A Village Roadshow Pictures production, Warner Bros. release, rated PG-13.
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