Smart and almost Smart

The Gt Smart material, so steeped in Cold War sensibilities, doesn't work as well today.

Get Smart (PG) 3 stars National release IN updating the 1960s Mel Brooks-Buck Henry television series Get Smart, which spoofed the James Bond films of the era, director Peter Segal and his team have wrought plenty of changes, notably making Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) quite a bit smarter. But the material, so steeped in Cold War sensibilities, doesn't work as well today.

The action scenes, of which there are many, are rather routinely handled: the climactic race against time to save the US president from assassination during a concert of Beethoven's Ode to Joy is a blatant rip-off of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Luckily the cast is excellent. Carell is an amiable hero with a sure sense of comic timing, Anne Hathaway is excellent as his resourceful sidekick, and Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson is very funny as Control's super-agent.

Even better are the actors in smaller roles: Alan Arkin as Control's chief, Terence Stamp as smooth-talking villain Siegfried, and James Caan as the befuddled president who has difficulty pronouncing the word nuclear. These amiable actors elevate what may otherwise have been a rather ordinary exercise in nostalgia for audiences still fond of the bumbling Don Adams (the original Maxwell Smart) and his misadventures.