Get Smart (2008)Film Review

Like Fun With Dick and Jane, this was a film that I re-watched after disliking the first time, and was generally, pleasantly surprised. Having loved the television series Get Smart, I wondered how on earth it could be remade with any credibility at all. The answer? Steve Carell.

The premise is that Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) is an analyst at CONTROL, a secret spy agency. He is desperate to get out into the field and be an agent, despite being quite physically incompetent. A break-in results in Maxwell being one of the only agents able to be deployed, sent out with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway).

It’s quite good, but certainly any weaknesses in the script are saved by the cast. Not only is there Carell and Hathaway, but Alan Arkin as the chief, Bill Murray in a delightful cameo as Agent 13, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson (who I totally love playing comedy or action, but ideally both) as Agent 23 and Terence Stamp as Siegfried from KAOS. For me, I still didn’t like the last half hour or so. Perhaps it should have been a ninety minute film rather than a hundred-and-ten minute film. Or perhaps the last section just needed to be better.

If you are a massive Get Smart (the television show) fan, you may like the nods to the original that are in this, but overall, there was no way it was ever going capture the kitsch glamour of the original.

 

The Expendables (2010) and The Expendables 2 (2012) Film Review

 

Don’t watch this film for the storyline. There is one. I think. But who cares? If you’re watching these films, you’re watching them to see Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris and heaps of other massive action film stars all in it together.

The films don’t disappoint – if you want explosions, guns that literally rip people in two, blood, serious muscles and corny one-liners. They do disappoint if you want plot, sub-plot and facial expressions (man, the amount of plastic surgery on screen is surprising). You don’t need the first film to know what is going on in the second, and the second is heaps better. Unfortunately, Jet Li is out of the film early on, but in the second film there is one scene with Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone all with massive machine guns killing bad guys in the airport. What more do you want? Chuck Norris? Yeah, you get him too. And I’m pretty sure he made a Chuck Norris joke.

Expendables 3 is on IMDB, apparently to be directed by John Woo and Nicholas Cage is on board. I was hoping for Wesley Snipes – he should be out of jail (tax fraud) this year, according to the internet. But Cage will do.