Get Smart is essentially the comedy equivalent of one of William Gibson ’s recent novel . It ’s present - sidereal day science fabrication , filled with superspies and gamey - tech gadgets that just might subsist in existent life if you squint . Looked at from that perspective , you ’d think the film would be a slam - dunk . Steve Carell plays the nerdy klutz Maxwell Smart who save the world , Heroes ’ Masi Oka has a bit part as the precious engineer who makes a buggy cone of secrecy , and kicky Anne Hathaway flirt Maxwell ’s brother Agent 99 . And the tint of the flick is broadly speaking true to Mel Brooks and Buck Henry ’s original schmendrick - as - hero tonus . So what made this merriment niggling movie movie fall short ? I think it ’s because the honest-to-god - school Catskill Mountains Judaic humour of the original clangoring so intensely with what is ultimately a zany , futuristic tale . ( despoiler forwards . )
reckon Get Smart alongside the summertime ’s other wacky Jewish spy motion-picture show : Do n’t Mess with the Zohan . Like Smart , Zohan is a Judaic intelligence agent on a series of cracked adventures . The difference is that Zohan comes from the contemporaneous earth : He ’s an Israeli ninja , fleeing contemporary political machination . He ’s openly Jewish , piss hummos jizz jokes , and basically takes the whole fruity Jewboy matter to its extreme . It works because we subsist in a world where Israelis are , in fact , top-notch - ninja of the intelligence activity community . This is contemporary Judaic temper : It acknowledges that Jews can be tough , but that they might in fact aim to be something else . You know , like styler .
But the original Get Smart come from a clip when Judaic identity , and Jewish humor , were titillate by a very unlike solidifying of issues in the West . It was an era when Jews in the U.S. were still struggling to be consider as anything other than rima oris - breathing nerds or communist spies . Maxwell Smart is a Jew from that era : He ’s a total jerk who struggle to be a topnotch - broker . In fact , he ’s not even openly a Jew , though every Jew who learn that show know what was up . ( Jewish practical joker Mel Brooks and Buck Henry created the show , and a ton of Judaic cat worked on it as writers . ) What ’s jarring about the movie remaking is how little the writers tried to update the humor .
The young Get Smart film ’s references to nudniks , and Alan Arkin ’s screaming hand - wavey schtick , seem retro because they are still the covert Judaic laugh of the 1960s . They are flat from an geological era when Hollywood Jews were closety about their pagan screen background . Despite the fact that the Get Smart television set show featured a automaton name Hymie and was compact with Yiddish references , you’re able to bet that most of its consultation had no idea they were titter at Judaic wit . To update Get Smart for a new generation , the writer needed to make all that old - school covert Jewishness into something hilariously overt , or just get rid of it .
The anachronistic Judaic wit of Get Smart is revelatory of the film ’s entire trouble , which is that it ca n’t decide whether to be a futurist undercover agent sarcasm , or to give homage to a bygone era . It strikes an awkward balance , comprise a post - feminist Agent 99 ( who is Maxwell Smart ’s boss this clip around ) and a black Agent ( Dwayne Johnson , who turns out to be the bad guy , so much like a schwartze , nu ? ) . And then are the two nerds , including Oka , who are supposed to map the iPod propagation but alas calculate very little into the plot . Basically we ’re left with a temporally - challenge satire .
Get Smart also assay unsuccessfully to update the Cold War scenario with KAOS vs. CONTROL . There are a ton of queer home they could have gone with this . KAOS could have evolved into the Russian mafia , or could have fall in up with those cartoonish “ terrorists ” from Iron Man . And CONTROL could have been engage into the Department of Homeland Security . Whatever — I ’m not ask you to give me a writing caper in Hollywood , I ’m just say there are a heap of funny elbow room they could have updated the Cold War humor and they did n’t . It was still fundamentally KGB vs. CIA , and the premiss vanish as flat as a Shelley Berman routine would today .
I ’m not saying the movie was n’t fun — it was , especially for a person like me who farm up with a family that hero-worship Mel Brooks , Sid Caesar , Lenny Bruce and Groucho Marx . Will it play for a coevals that jazz Sarah Silverman , the Beastie Boys and Adam Sandler ? Probably not — but it miss by this much .
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