'Get Smart' needs to follow its own advice.

I remember getting ready to watch the film version of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" for the first time. I was excited. I was not nearly the fan that I am now (I had only read the first three, and I believe the first one was the only one I had read multiple times), but I was still eager to see one of my favorite books brought to the screen.

Sadly, I was disappointed.

The casting for Arthur and Ford was perfect (or, for fans of the books, "prefect." haha). The voices for Marvin and the guide are also great, and the Heart of Gold is good for some gags. Most of the rest of the movie, unfortunately, falls short. Trillian is boring, Zaphod is awful (and his two-headedness is not handled correctly at all) and neither the spirit nor the events of the books are respected. There are some nods here and there, but that's all.

Now while some TV shows, books or video games aren't really adaptable to the silver screen, Hitchhiker's could have been done very well. It has worked in book form, as a TV show, as a video game (sort of) and in its original format as a radio broadcast. The manic absurdity could translate quite well to the big screen. But, alas, it didn't. What a disappointment for Douglas Adam's fans.

All of that to say that film adaptations of other things are tricky. Let's look at few, shall we?

Comic books are a mixed bag. Lord of the Rings-some loved them, others didn't (I being among the latter group, for the most part). Narnia-the director seems to have trouble balancing adventure with truism to the books. The Bourne movies-Well, all 8 fans of those books were probably disappointed. Dudley DoRight? Ugh. George of the Jungle? I haven't seen it, but I've heard ugh. Rocky and Bullwinkle? Well, I actually liked that one. As a fan of the show and of the movie, I liked that the goofball awful pun plot contrivance spirit of the show carried over. However, the point remains. When you make a film adaptation, someone is going to complain.

Get Smart would seem to be a perfect candidate for a film adaptation. There's slapstick, wordplay, funny gadgets and appeal to multiple age groups. Plus, it has Steve Carell, who can make almost anything funny, Anne Hathaway, The Rock, Alan Arkin and other stars. It could a be a film that's fun for the whole family. Right?

Shoulda woulda coulda, unfortunately. The plot sounds fun enough: Agent Maxwell Smart is promoted after all of the other agents' covers are blown. He and the one remaining covert agent go to Russia to find nuclear weapons held by terrorists. Max is betrayed, escapes, and foils the nuclear attack on the President (although the movie seems to indicate that if the President is Bush, death by radioactive explosion might not be so bad. More on that later). If any of that is a spoiler to you, you probably were expecting a completely different movie altogether.

The most unfortunate part is that Steve Carell does a great job, and the other actors do well too. There's even a quite funny cameo by Bill Murray. The writers, too, unearth a few gems in their screenplay (including a few genuinely funny show references, a sly remark about the self-importance of actors and a few other clever, unexpected jokes). However, when I say unearth, there's something the writers were unearthing it from.

A lot of reviewers are giving this film lower marks because they feel like it's uneven. They feel that the action scenes and some of the violence don't always mesh with the quirky comedy. I disagree. I think that the action works with the comedy, kind of because there are jokes thrown into the fight scenes so it's not action scene/comic scene/action scene/comic scene the entire movie. However, I did feel that the film was uneven.

Now, this is the point where, if my mom ever reads this, she will purse her lips slightly with mild, concerning disapproval (I really do appreciate your concern, Mom). I don't mind all sexual jokes. I occasionally tell sexual jokes. They can be funny if they aren't disgusting and if the movie isn't in love with them. But they can also be unfunny and stupid. This is what happened a lot of the time during this movie.

Whenever the movie was about to get into a comedic groove, the writers would throw in a couple of uncreative sexual jokes, including a homosexual sight gag that no one needed to see. In addition to this, the camera very annoyingly seems to find new angles and ways to ogle Anne Hathaway's body. She knows it too. You can tell just by subtle facial expressions that she gets when she thrusts out her chest during a dance or bares most of her leg; she's totally thinking, "Yeeeeah, I'm sexy. Get some." And it detracts from the film.

The other thing that I thought was stupid, and this is more just an aside about the movie biz in general, is the movie's "political satire" of George Bush. Don't get me wrong, satirizing politicians can be really funny. But this wasn't funny. Nor was it satire. The one bit of satire (the President reading books to kids in a library) is rather displaced, and it's not really even amusing. The rest of it, which includes the President falling asleep during a concert, the President laughing at a conductor getting tackled and the President taking juvenile joy in a man's exposed butt, isn't satire, nor is it something that ANYone hasn't seen before. Seriously, this is one of the oldest shticks that is still popular in Hollywood, and it needs to end. It reminded me of (the bad movie) Transformers, where the President has a southern accent and wants to eat some ding dongs, and this is satire somehow. Except not at all.

Overall, it was a moderately funny movie with some annoying persistent stupid gags. I'd watch it again, but not for a good amount of time.