The TV series Get Smart! (1965-1970) was a send-up of the 007-style swanky-spy-adventure movies & TV shows that were popular at the time. As a genre parody, it was cute & clever, but this easygoing Secret Agent Man spoofery wasn’t the true source of the show’s laughs. There have, for my money, only been a few shows in TV history that generated more laughs, & perhaps none that did so more efficiently—Get Smart! won, I would estimate, 90% percent of its giggles through the almost liturgical use of running gags.

The show’s creators, Mel Brooks & Buck Henry, along with Arne Sultan & a few other writers, crafted a dozen or so stock lines, & just had their hero, CONTROL Agent 86 Maxwell Smart (Don Adams), keep spouting them. If you didn’t find these gags funny, the show meant nothing to you. But if, like me, you did find them funny, then you found them funnier every time you heard them.

But while the gags were the source of the laughs, the laughs weren’t the whole source of the show’s appeal. Adams, who won three Emmys for his work on the show, was enormously likable. Max was a numbskull, of course, but he was somehow less tiresome than other TV numbskull-heroes. He was spirited, dapper & good in a fistfight, & for all his screw-ups he always came out on top, so that his imbecility never got depressing, the way it could with, say, Gilligan, or sometimes with Felix Unger.

Above all, Max was adored by the leggy, chic, bottomlessly sweet & highly competent Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon). How could you feel sorry for anyone who had that going for him?

Also, the show generally had a charmingly threadbare, low-budget, unpopulated look to it. Max’s famous “Would you believe...?” ploys, in which he would try to convince the villains that scores of CONTROL agents were surrounding the building or whatever, really were hard to believe. Now & then there’d be a novelty appearance by someone like Hymie the Robot (Dick Gautier) or poor cramped Agent 13 (David Ketchum), but usually Max & 99 were backed up only by the long-suffering, avuncular Chief (Edward Platt), & The Chief’s brainless sidekick Larrabee (Robert Karvelas).

CONTROL’s opposite agency, KAOS, seemed well staffed with thuggish types to menace Max. But like The Chief, KAOS bigwig Siegfried (Bernie Kopell)—always reproving his overenthusiastic sidekick Shtarker (King Moody)—seemed far more hands-on than his exalted position should have required.

This spare, small-potatoes feel was a strength of Get Smart! rather than a weakness. It gave the show a warm, almost familial atmosphere—even Siegfried came off more as an annoying cousin than a nemesis. If only international intelligence really were anything like this, surely the world would be a far better place.

This flavor is part of what’s missing from the new theatrical version of Get Smart opening today. The material gets the full Hollywood treatment—palatial sets, spectacular chase scenes, elaborate special effects, celebrity cameos—yet it feels oddly half-hearted & obligatory.

The script makes Max an insecure CONTROL analyst who aspires to be a daring field agent. As appalling a mistake as this is—Max should never have anything to prove to himself—the film makes a worse one: Max & 99 (Anne Hathaway) meet in the course of the story, & they bicker. She has backstory issues, too, & so 99—the coolest & most supportive of iconic TV girlfriends (& often, of course, the unsung source of Max’s success) doesn’t trust Max at first, & they bicker. Aaaargh!

But even though it’s not very good, the new Get Smart is watchable, thanks mainly to Steve Carell, who plays Max. Carell, superlative in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (maybe my favorite movie comedy yet this decade) is turning out to be a formidable leading man. He attempts a lower-key, less brassy version of Max than Adams, & his suavity & aplomb keep this unimaginative movie going. Hathaway looks uncommonly delicious, & there’s nothing wrong with her acting, but as scripted she just isn’t 99.

The same made be said for the movie overall: It just isn't Get Smart! It doesn't have that same feel, not even close. There may be no element of it, however, more disappointing than Terence Stamp’s Siegfried. As played by Bernie Kopell back on the show, Siegfried was one of the great comic villains in TV history. But Stamp—an admirable actor who should have gotten Oscar nominations for The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1994 & The Limey in 1999—seems dazed with boredom here.

Under the circumstances, this may be understandable; still, someone should have had the nerve to tell him, a la Siegfried: “Schtamp—Ziss iss Get Schmart. Vee don’t valk through supporting roles here.”