Get Smart The Movie The Shoot
Get Smart will be released in movie theaters across the country on the 20th of June this year. It is a remake of the hit TV comedy series of the 60s with the same name - a series that not just ran for five years but won a lot of awards too. The shooting for this movie began last year in February 2007 and some of the shooting was done in Canada in Montreal. The movie has been in the making since 1999 but once shooting started, it was wrapped up pretty quickly and it is all set for release in June.
The reason probably that the movie took so long to start off was because of the script which many actors and actresses felt was quite bad. It did leak out that the producers were hard-pressed to find an actress of worth to take on the role of 99 which had deteriorated in the new script to a rather aggressive, shrewish character. Unfortunately, the old TV series is still so well remembered that it would have been a hard task for any remake to try and better the original. The fact that the script seemed to have shades of Johnny English did not help.
Add to that the fact that there was a controversy over the whole original creative team. The team which consisted of Mel Brooks, Leonard Stern, and Buck Henry was totally ignored when the new version of Get Smart started rolling. Then came the law suit and suddenly, two of the original team were in the movie as consultants. Rather late in the day and so we probably will not see their genius touch of comedy in this movie. Rumor has it that all the shooting had been canned by the time they came on board. One wonders if the trajectory of the film's fortunes would have somehow been different if they had been involved from the beginning.
As things stand, Get Smart has not been well received by the ones who seen the previews. The ones who have read the script say it is atrocious and insulting to anyone with average intelligence, the humor is supposed to be terrible and the whole film does not seem to have pulled together. True, there are a number of good if not great actors in the movie. One hopes that they will lift the movie out of the morass of bad press that the movie seems to have generated.