Reviews

Maxwell Smart is an analyst with the covert secret agency CONTROL. Max is very good at his job, but now yearns to be an agent in the field. After passing the tests that he needs to in order to advance, the arch forces of the enemy agency KAOS threaten to strike in a devastating way. Now it's up to Max to find out for sure what is being done and to stop them.

And that's a very loose description of the premise to Get Smart, a movie updating and re-imagining of the classic comedy TV series from the 1960s...

... and the new winner to the title of "Worst Movie Of The Year," and here it is, I thought it was going to take some time before something could take that title away from M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening and yet this movie does so with ease.

This is supposed to be a comedy and yet, I didn't laugh at a thing in the film and so right there it fails and fails miserably. Even when this is relying on some of the old chestnuts from the original series (with one notable exception), this just fails.

And the reason for that failure is on two counts- it's ill-conceived as a movie, and the character of Maxwell Smart has been seriously compromised.

Now, y'see, back when the show was on, it was genuinely funny and being the brainchild of comedy legends Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, you'd expect it to be. The TV series was a spoof of spy movies, it was a low budget and very small show, and yet it was loaded with big, but two-dimensional characters, and the biggest of them all was Maxwell Smart. And it was also ridiculously rapid-fire with it's jokes and gags. And also, I loved the original series, I think it was one of the all-time greats in television comedy.

Here... here, director Peter Segal gets it entirely wrong. First, this is trying to be an action movie with lots of comedic overtones, and it's also very big, especially in consideration of it's source, and the biggest thing that they do wrong in the midst of all of that is that they try to make you think it's real, and that was never the spirit of the original show by any means.

The second thing that they get wrong is in the character of Maxwell Smart. Now Don Adams was a genius and he knew just how Smart was to be played. Smart was the GREATEST secret agent in the world, especially in his own mind, even if he screwed up more often than not, but above all he was extremely confident. Here, they've turned Maxwell Smart into the most politically correct weenie on the planet, and there's some small part of me that can't help but wonder if this is in some way partly due to Steve Carell and what he's been doing in some of his other movies lately. This Maxwell Smart's main drive is to understand that his enemies in the world are people first and if you get to know the person, you then find the weakness, but his way of getting to the weakness is with compassion more than anything else...

... oh for cryin' out loud...

This movie is nearly two hours long, and that's because it's trying to be an action movie and it's pacing itself that way, and when it throws in it's gags, it just falls flat and even worse than that... boring.

Now there is plenty here for the Get Smart TV series fan, lots of bits and sight gags, and every now and then, Carell well spout out one of the lines that Max used in the day and because of the change that they made with Smart himself, that line just feels like Steve Carell saying the line by rote and little else.

On paper, Steve Carell should be perfect for the part... that is if he would be willing to play something just as two-dimensional as what Maxwell Smart was (and even moreso if the movie would've been willing to go that route- this movie is looking at Mission: Impossible when it should be looking at Airplane! or Blazing Saddles), but here, he just seems like amateur night or what you'd get if Michael Scott (his character from The Office) was trying to act. Anne Hathaway plays Smart's partner, Agent 99, and first off, she just looks fantastic and also looks like she would have a real affinity with being in a legitimate action film, it's just too bad that she's in this one. And her character has been changed as well, in particularly to be a little more shrewish than anything else.

Get Smart is as ill-conceived as a TV-to-movie adaptation/remake/re-imagining can get and even though it tries to have some echoes of the original series, those echoes fall flat due to a poor conception of the film and a dramatically ill-conceived new interpretation of it's lead character. As such, you have a comedy here that's just not funny on virtually any level (with the one exception) and if a comedy isn't funny then it's a bad movie, and this one is just about as bad as it gets. About a half hour before this ended, I was just about ready to ask the other four people I was with if anyone wanted to leave (none of us were enjoying this), but we stood through it all the way until it's incredibly sappy end... oh I wish we had, but then I couldn't pass on this cautionary review on to you...

Right now... Get Smart is the worst movie of the year, period.

Y'know, I saw this listed on one of the Showtime channels, and I like poker so I thought I'd give it a glance...

Oh man... Look, I'm not one normally to go as far off the deep end in coming down on a film as a lot of people do, but really, All In deserves every bit of blasting that it's getting here (except of course for all of those suspicious gushing posts at the start). This felt to me like it was written by a 14-year old who likes poker but also wanted to make his socio-political "statement" without having any sort of life experience there to make such a statement. This could've been fun if there was some sort of high camp value to it (like say what Showgirls has) but it just takes itself too damn seriously.

Dominique Swain is never once convincing that she has these poker "skills" (seeming more of an embarrassment to anyone that's ever studied the game) and often times, especially during one of her emotional rants, she comes off as grating more than anything else. I thought it was nice to see both Michael Madsen and Lou Gossett, Jr. here, though it's clear that they're cashing a check, they at least still have some credibility to their parts. Not so with the rest of the cast, especially our cartoonish doctors and the Saved By The Bell-lite medical students.

But then still you have to contend with the poor pacing and the extremely clumsy way of shooting this, there's never any tension here, and never any excitement. this one's both an embarrassment as a poker movie and even as schlocky soap opera... 1/10 and that's being generous...

Reading through some of the other IMDB comments here makes me wonder if some of the folks here have any sense of putting something in perspective. John Carpenter's Escape From New York is very much a product of it's time, that when compared to other big budget movies of today, it just won't hold up (at least for the younger viewer who's really not willing to give a low budget movie a chance). Having a sense of perspective with this film can certainly open you up to it. I was fortunate, I got to see Escape From New York when it first premiered in theatres back in 1981. John Carpenter was building his reputation, and when Escape was announced, it certainly seemed like a novel concept and more original than anyone really gives it credit for- this sort of thing just wasn't done in 1981, and now so many things that were introduced in this movie seem more par for the course. It's a clever concept: a rising criminal population gives birth to a United States Police Force and the idea of turning the entire island of Manhattan into the largest maximum security prison in the world. Air Force One, on it's way to an important world peace summit, has been hijacked by terrorists with the intent of crashing the plane in Manhattan and taking the President's life. The President survives, and the United States Police Force comes up with a plan to save his life involving one very special prisoner newly transferred to Manhattan, former Special Force operative-turned-criminal S. D. "Snake" Plissken.

Bringing proper perspective to this, one can see that John Carpenter was very much ahead of his time. Today, many of the trappings of this movie are pretty standard, but when it was first released, there were things here that just weren't done. One thing I really admire is just how creative a filmmaker with a very low budget can be, and John Carpenter is one of the very best with a low budget. Sticking with a low budget, let's Carpenter come in with a pretty uncompromised vision- and it certainly comes through- action, suspense and comic book sensitivities are all over here, and had Carpenter been working from a larger budget under greater restrictions, you just might not have the film that you have now (and moreso, other movies as they are now- this really is an influence on a lot of other filmmakers).

There's a whole lot of visual style here, and again that's pretty amazing when you take into account Carpenter's limited budget. It is a little eerie to watch it again and see the World Trade Center in such a prominent role in the film- the eerieness continues when the Air Force One is crashed into a building by terrorists. I love the fact that Carpenter composes and performs most all of the music for his movies (I think his score for Halloween remains one of the best horror movie scores ever made), they drive them right and they're neat "signatures" in the end. His score for Escape From New York is a little more varied than some of his other film music, and still just as effective.

It's a great cast, with a career-making performance from Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken. Again, putting this in the proper perspective, this was a big chance in Russell's career at the time- he was still better known for his work in Disney films, and was just starting to break that mold. Escape From New York cracked that mold entirely and I think Russell himself would be one of the first to say that it shaped his career. Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton and Carpenter-regulars like Charles Cyphers, Tom Atkins, and Frank Doubleday are all solid here- very definite character types, pretty two-dimensional, but that doesn't matter, they drive the story. One can really see that Isaac Hayes was definitely in to his part as the Duke of New York, Donald Pleasance genuinely invested something in his performance as the President of the United States. And it was very nice to see both Carpenter's and Russell's wives, Adrienne Barbeau and Season Hubley in this film. Hubley's scene is brief, but very well done. Barbeau is in this significantly more, and she was simply the stuff of dreams then (not taking anything away from her now either), and it's a very confident performance (I just love watching her face down the Duke's car at the very end). I just bought the new Special Edition DVD and it's a lovely package. Although I haven't been able to go through all of the contents yet, one of the must-see (or in this case must-hear) features is the commentary track from John Carpenter and Kurt Russell. I understand that this is from the original laserdisc, so while there's a certain amount of perspective in their commentary, it's not the same as it would be today (especially after the events of 9-11). It's a very enjoyable commentary from two guys who had great memories of this film and who obviously love to work together. Carpenter is quite specific and very telling in all aspects of the film (some of those 3D computer graphics aren't 3D computer graphics- the flythrough of New York? Black boxes with green lines painted on them... and yet it still looks cool)- as much as I admired his skills before, after listening to the commentary, I admire them even more. Escape From New York is a wonderful piece of work. It's an important film in the career of a visionary filmmaker and an important film for one of today's better known leading men. Those of us who are older and experienced this way back when, will certainly appreciate it's craft, now more than ever. For younger viewers though, you definitely need a sense of perspective with this- trying to hold it too the same standards as you would a movie made today is hardly fair, and you're just doing yourself a disservice by not opening yourself a little further. Escape From New York is highly, highly recommended and a proud addition to my DVD library.

It's pretty amusing to read all of the negative comments on the new Battlestar Galactica from all of the "die-hards" all up in arms because this isn't a continuation or somehow or another "betrays the ideas of the original series" as if the original series had high ideas (and really, there's nothing wrong with fans looking into it and seeing it, or with actors and producers doing the same thing after the fact- but considering how those ideas were originally presented when the series first aired, it's amazing that there's anything even recognizable as ideas in the first place- that's not a knock on the original show, but it was hardly created with the idea of having high ideas, it was created because ABC want to have a Star Wars TV show and Glen Larson was just the lucky guy to have his premise ready quickest. It filled a Sunday night timeslot mostly designed for a younger viewer and most fans who saw it originally were children when they saw it and even though Star Wars was around, this was still relatively the only game in town). Reading through most of the negative comments here, the die-hards certainly are vocal in complaining, but hardly offer up the "whys" as to what the hell Ronald Moore and David Eick are betraying. of course, you've all been warned, just about everything I've read with Edward James Olmos on the new show, he's urged the die-hards who think they're running the risk with being hurt with this, just to not watch the show... too bad that some of you just didn't heed that advice, you could save yourself a lot of pain... It's more pleasing to read all of the nice comments from those who did come in to this with an open mind. Much like a lot of you, I too saw this when I was younger (I was 16 when it first aired and I'm 41 today) and enjoyed it then, even though I could still see a certain amount of cheese to it. I got slightly less enchanted with it as I got a little older, and now I just go back and look at it as a simpler time (and I shelled out the dough for the Complete Series DVD collection) and enjoy it on a different level. The original was a fun show, but definitely a product of it's time. You read of how people want to see continuations, and yet as I read of Richard Hatch's plans, it still seems to me that he was planning to deviate in some form from the original series too- would the "die-hards" be happy with that? In the end, I think they would find just as much to complain about there as they are with the new version. It was a totally smart move to "re-imagine" this and give it a new lease on life from scratch with the potential to pick up a new audience. It does a good job at keeping interest in the original series (as witness to the recent DVD set), that I just don't think a continuation would've done. A continuation would've had major appeal to the die-hards but little appeal beyond that. Doing what they've done is the TV equivalent of taking the 1940s Flash comic character and revamping and re-working him for the 1960s. I've now watched both parts to the new version and I thought that it was excellent, compelling stuff and nowhere at all, did I feel like I'd been slapped in the face with contempt for liking the original show. There is so much here that "nods" to the original, and I certainly appreciated that. Moore and Eick have certainly given this way more weight than it's ever had before, the original series handles the rout of humanity in a more off-hand and less controversial way and gets us to the casino planet faster. This new version invests this with great weight and subtle emotion, more along the lines of shock from an event just to unbelieveable to really be happening and yet it is happening. The Cylon set-up here is very well-thought out and just way beyond what was presented in the original series, something closer to what was shown in The Second Renaisssance of The Animatrix (the more cynical would now be saying "see they ripped off The Matrix, how can they be so bereft of ideas?" Look, get a clue, if you don't like the series... fine, just don't accuse it of something that you wouldn't even think of doing with another series that you do like... as good as things like Babylon 5, Farscape or Firefly are, there's still nothing new there that hasn'e been done in science fiction some way or another in the past, and that's not going to change anytime too soon). I like the fact that we see four forms of Cylon through this series: the original TV series influenced design, the newer soldier type of design, the fighter ship design and the entirely humanoid design. This presents this race with a little something more on the ball than how it was shown in the original series, and gives further credo to another science fiction convention: the legitimate sentientcy of A. I. It's an amazing looking piece of work, and I applaud the idea of making it seem more handheld on all quarters from the actual live shots to the special effects shots. Speaking of the visual effects, I think this raises the bar for televised science fiction- As the Galactica and the fleet were making their final escape from the Cylons over Ragnar, I thought that that space battle was certainly as thrilling as anything I've seen theatrically. (Again, the negative comments about the effects are pretty perplexing here- what would you rather see, the same stock footage of the same miniature Viper flying by again and again. Everybody and their brother is now an "expert" at what is and isn't good CGI, so OK... for you haters of the effects, what's your basis for what would be an accurate portrayal of an outer space battle?) And I've certainly got to hand them props for the unconventional casting. Edward James Olmos certainly plays Adama far and away differently than before- in the original show, Lorne Greene's performance is literally Ben Cartwright in space (and again, that's not a knock- but that is what they wanted from him at the time), Olmos' performance feels more like that of an accomplished military man, but one who's had his eyes opened dramatically. His speech near the final moments of Part 2 was inspiring, and to these ears anyway, certainly heartfelt. I really liked Aaron Douglas as Chief Tyrol, this character just has "rock" of stability written all over him. James Callis' performance as Baltar is really riveting, watching this smug character being undone by his own desires and watching those desires further manipulate him is just an awesome approach to this character. And that's further aided by... Tricia Helfer as Number Six, without a doubt, one of the sexiest villainesses I've seen on a science fiction show in a long time. Amazing how she exudes equal amounts of sexiness and creepiness at the same time. And the source of much controversy, Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck... I thought she was terrific, and in my opinion it's one of the more confident performances in the whole series. I really hope this is successful for the Sci-Fi Channel, if at the very least to give us another mini-series out of it, if not a full series. There's a lot of good ideas at hand here, and as long as you're willing to give it a chance, and have an open mind, then it delivers the goods. There's no reason at all why both versions of Battlestar Galactica can not co-exist in the hearts of fans... genuinely well done... Bravo to Ronald Moore, David Eick and the Sci-Fi Channel for daring to take the chance.