Quickie: Got Smart?

Get Smart is a pleasant surprise, heavily carried by the prodigious comic talents of Steve Carrell and, to a lesser extent, Alan Arkin. Carrell has that rare gift in comics of conveying wholly-fleshed out characters with backstories you can almost divine who also happen to be funny, as opposed to cutouts that serve as joke dispensaries. Get Smart does not offer a whole lot of opportunities to get serious, but Carrell's bumbling Agent 86 still draws upon a human core that the one-dimensional Don Adams never did. Arkin, whose harried straight role in The In-Laws is one of the underappreciated comedic gems of the 20th century (yes, go rent it now), plays here a variation of that type, and does it very well. Anne Hathaway, who has unexpectedly emerged as a quite talented actress, holds her own, while Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson seems to have arrived at the Steven-Seagal-starring-in-Executive-Decision phase of his career. 

The plot is pedestrian and could have easily been lifted from the story templates from any 1960s spy series, but the pacing of the comedy is very good; director Peter Segal did apprentice with farce masters Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. Apart from the expected comedic set pieces (mostly well-executed), there are enough out-of-left-field ideas that keep the enterprise engaging -- Agent 13, a nice riff on the tango scene from True Lies, and Ken Davitian as he approaches his expiration date. And the seeming malleability of Frank Gehry's controversial Walt Disney Concert Hall emerges as a minor plot point, and I wonder if that was an intentional or accidental architectural critique.