The hugely popular TV series (1965-70) owed much of its success to the characters created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, Maxwell Smart (Don Adams), a bumbling CONTROL agent who always saved America from the diabolical schemes of the KAOS organisation through sheer luck and/or the skill of his female partner, agent 99 (Barbara Feldon).
At the time, the Bond and secret agent craze was at its height so the series’ satiric spoofing of such agents and organisations also contributed towards that success. But probably what viewers remember best were the performances from Adams who played Smart as lovably goofy and Feldon’s very endearing portrayal.
The film again pits Smart (Steve Carell) and agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) against the forces of KAOS, here represented by Siegfried (Terence Stamp) and his right hand man, Shtarker who’s played by Ken Davitian, the fat guy in Borat and who accounts for the film’s best gags.
It’s more faithful to the original series than the rest of the Hollywood TV remakes which usually have little or nothing in common. And the same 40-year-old ideas still work as in the corridor full of different security gates that slam in place one after the other as they did in the original’s credits sequence.
Carell’s performance is in a lower key than Adams but there’s that marvellous poker face, his deadpan delivery and his blissful ignorance of his blunders. However, unlike the original Smart who never got a break from the writers, Carell’s agent is allowed more than the occasional success in his assignments.
Presumably because of political correctness, they’ve depicted agent 99 as an independent, successful high kicking and always resourceful female agent with her own back story and lovers.
It’s stupid because it jars, takes the film far away from the humorous coupling of the original and leaves Anne Hathaway without a synchronised character to portray.
There’s none of the original’s satire and the film is more of an action thriller with some humour. It has its big bangs, its shootouts, fights and chases, particularly the elaborately staged and excitingly executed plane versus car-in-traffic chase.
It also has its comical moments but not enough of them. The one hour and 50 minutes running time is overlong for such a caper film, resulting in the film getting stuck in a couple of dull passages before someone, like the ever reliable Alan Arkin, who plays Smart’s boss, goes to its rescue.
Deep Throat was a 1972 hardcore porn movie which made history by becoming the first one of its kind to be reviewed by even the more serious publications, like Time magazine. It was about a woman (Linda Lovelace) who finds that her clitoris lies in her throat.
Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein may have plundered that film for his variation of a teen, Dawn (Jess Weixler) who discovers that she has the mythical vagina dentate, a vagina equipped with razor-sharp teeth.
That should come in handy since Jess is an ardent member of a chastity group which has taken a ‘sacred oath’ of abstinence till marriage. But hormones being what they are, Jess falls for ‘born again’ virgin Tobey (Hale Appleman).
They go swimming and when Tobey gets too excited to refrain from having sex with Dawn, he ends up with a dismembered member and the first of Dawn’s victims.
Plundered or not, the idea is loaded with possibilities but Lichtenstein doesn’t take it in any new or particular direction and his film panders to the feminists’ cheap gratification by exploiting the male fear of castration.
Those who force themselves on Dawn end up losing the family jewels but when Dawn welcomes sexual intercourse and finds it pleasurable, her toothy vagina doesn’t bite.
Had they been pushed further into caricature, the chopped off penis scenes could have worked as gallows humour, but like everything else about the film, Lichtenstein’s lazy direction snuffs out every possibility. It’s not a horror film because a few gory scenes don’t make a horror film and the very slow pacing excludes the possibility of tension.
The sexual repression is suffocating and the hysteria of the chaste brigade rally isn’t all that different from Nazi rallies. There’s nothing to justify the film’s nastiness and it’s so amateurish that it left me wanting to see a real film.
“It’s a dark day for the Republic,” a character moans at the beginning of Clone Wars. And it’s a much darker day for the cinema when a TV pilot like this is blown up and released in cinemas at the same price of admission that one pays for a proper cinema feature.
As the clone-droid armies battle on, Anakin Skywalker (voice of Matt Lanter) has to rescue the child of Jabba the Hut. Accompanied by his new and excruciatingly annoying girl sidekick, Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein), he has to take him back to Tatooine where the evil Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) awaits to spring a trap.
The disappointment of making Clone Wars as a cartoon is doubled because this isn’t quality animation but the cut price type one finds in the lower niche TV cartoon series.
The characters have no personality, their facial expressions are minimal and fake-looking Facial features come in one of two types: stone faces like those of the US presidents in Monument Valley or wooden Totem pole heads.
The computer guys fare better with the droid and clone armies because these don’t require the details that human characters must have. There’s a lot of action, but since it’s not motivated by the plot or the characters, it’s very boring.
Instead of motivation, the makers follow the same rule which says that action must follow every passage of dull dialogue or exposition. It looks a lower rung video game, and it’s so repetitive that a new word has to be coined to convey just how repetitive the action is.
I cannot see this TV pilot as appealing to any children other than those who put up with the inferior type of small screen cartoon series and who don’t mind that it looks worse when it’s blown up to fit the big screen. Accompanying adults are likely to spend their time wondering why films for children have fallen to such poor levels.
