I finished Get Smart (2008) last night. It was fair, but slightly better than I expected. It wasn’t a great spy movie, of course, but it wasn’t as funny as I expected. I was expecting nonstop slapstick, and this was simply a comedy. A fair amount of its humor was sexual, but it wasn’t always quite as heavy-handed as I was prepared for.

What was interesting to me was the problem the filmmakers set for themselves: a boy meets girl movie. How do you do that, when the boy is a bumbler — interestingly, Max was only a bumbler and not an outright idiot, as in the TV show — and the girl is an ultra-competent Jane Smith | Vesper Lynd | female Jason Bourne type? What could 99 find attractive in 86? (Answer: — spoiler alert! — he’s a good dancer.)