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Mostly charming, but out of date
WHAT film fans are really craving at the moment is another spoof spy film, right?
Wrong.
Steven Carell, who can turn his hand to comedy and drama with equal ease, is far better than the material on offer here.
It is inoffensive stuff, there are some amusing lines (although you get the feeling Carell's ad-libbing was helping along the script) and the cast – including Alan Alda and Anne Hathaway – are mostly charming.
The problem here is that the film just seems 20 years out of date. Most of the material has been done to death – characters prancing gymnastically around laser beams, putting on silly wigs and accents.
The film can't quite decide whether Carell – who plays analyst-turned-spy Maxwell Smart, who is thrown into the cut and thrust of international espionage to try and stop the President being blown up by a nuclear bomb – is supposed to be geeky or cool.
He and his sidekick, Agent 99 (Hathaway), blunder around Russia, swinging off buildings and shooting bad guys, but there are precious few thrills and only a handful of proper comedy moments.
Carell's comic timing flatters the script, which would have looked pretty flat on the page, but he needs to find some more original material rather than get locked into endless Get Smart sequels.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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