I have been slacking with my SodBlog movie reviews… I’ve been slacking with my movie watching. In the past month, I’ve seen only four films, and two of them were this past Thursday night. I saw Indy IV : The Dream Master on opening weekend but was too slow in my reviewing of it and by the time I came here, there were already two blog posts about it… Could I really add anything to the conversation? Probably not.

Then I saw The Incredible? Hulk opening weekend as well, but that was two days before I moved from PA to CA so I didn’t really have time to review that either. And that was it. For a guy who has seen as many as 7 movies in the theater in one weekend, going a month with only two was a little painful.

That’s when I decided to go out Thursday night. Who cares if I had to work in the morning? Who cares that I might still be adjusting to the jet lag? Who cares that I had stayed up till 2 am Wednesday night? I needed to get to the cineplex! Plus I noticed a limited release film that was not going to make it into the new weekend with wide releases of WALL-E and Wanted. I had seen mention of The Foot Fist Way in Entertainment Weekly and I believe it even got a quick review on “Ebert & Roeper” (minus the Ebert).

This low-budget “comedy” was filmed back in 2005-2006 and didn’t make much of a splash.. that is until Will Ferrell and Adam McKay saw it and fell in love with it. They helped promote and distribute it. It opened on just four screens back on June 1 and got up to a whopping 25 screens last weekend! It stars Danny McBride as Fred Simmons, a Ricky Bobby-like fifth degree black belt Tae Kwon Do instructor. The film’s “plot” centers around his marital problems and his attempt to get his martial hero Chuck “The Truck” (Ben Best) to appear at his class’s TKD testing session.

There were a couple of really funny scenes — and when I say “a couple” I literally mean two. One scene is when a male student with anger issues fights another student who happens to be an elderly lady who just learned an unstoppable combination. The other scene is when Simmons, two students, and another TKD instructor (this one, a sixth degree black belt) have a bit of a mistunderstanding with the band at The Truck’s hotel-room party. These two scenes really cracked me up.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film was filled with a few mildly funny lines and a lot of badly written dialogue. The scene where Suzie Simmons (Mary Jane Bostic) gets home from a work party and Fred accuses her, basically of being a whore is just brutal to listen to. I hope writers McBride, Best and Jody Hill go through a few more rewrites on their next project. It may be petty, but I was seriously annoyed when Suzie says “I think I’ll stay at my cousin Julie’s for a while.” The real husband/wife conversation would drop the “my cousin” but I suppose they thought we’d confuse her for a lesbian without knowing who this Julie was.

After being disappointed by this little indie film, I had the choice between messing with The Zohan or getting Smart. I think I chose wisely…

This reimaginging of the Mel Brooks inspired 1965 TV series starring the late & great Don Adams had the potential to suck. After all, funnyman Carell has had problems carrying a movie (I’m looking at you Evan Not-So-Almighty) in the past. Even his “starring” roles in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and TV’s “The Office” are often outshone by the supporting characters (”You know how I know you’re gay?”). Would this be another nail in his leading man coffin? Or could he actually pull it off as the iconic Maxwell Smart?

The movie started with some nostalgia–the company logos mirroring the opening credits of the TV show. Then we get a morning wake-up scene that made me think of 40YOV–I kept expecting to see Max struggle to go to the bathroom with his morning wood. But the rest of the movie was a good time. It may have been the disappointing lead-in, but I really enjoyed the film. There is actually some decent chemistry between Carell’s Max and Hathaway’s Agent 99. The movie uses a fat suit which I’ve rarely found funny, but it does provide a funny scene where the two share “Before” pictures.

There is a wide supporting cast–Dwayne “No Longer The Rock” Johnson, Academy Award winner Alan Arkin, Terence “General Zod” Stamp, James Caan, Bill Murray, Patrick Warburton, David Koechner and Terry Crews, who all do a fantastic job in their roles. But the funniest supporting guys are definitely Hiro from “Heroes” and the fat guy from “Studio 60″–Masi Oka & Nate Torrence play techies within CONTROL who are mistreated by most of the agents. There’s one scene with them in a hallway with Max that almost made a little pee come out.

There were some clunky scenes and a few moments where I thought “Did they seriously just do that?” (most memorable–the plane, train and automobile scene). And, of course the film could have been improved with more Terence Stamp. But there were plenty of nods to the original series–and while I haven’t seen many episodes I still enjoyed seeing things like the bubble helmet and shoe phone. Carell has also proven that he can carry a film–just not one of Biblical proportions.

The Foot Fist Way
Get Smart