Get Smart - Get Smart Again - 1989

Get Smart, Again!(1989)

PG 96 min
Comedy

Stars: Don Adams, Barbara Feldon

Maxwell Smart is called back to duty as KAOS is back causing trouble again, this time with a 'weather machine'. Although instructed to keep his mission secret from his wife, 99, Max can't keep hiding from her forever, and soon the two are working together again in this second Maxwell Smart movie.

The film is not as well known as the earlier theatrical release, 1980's The Nude Bomb, but was better received by fans of the original program. The Nude Bomb featured only four characters from the original TV show: Smart, Larrabee (played by Don Adams' cousin, Robert Karvelas), The Chief (with Dana Elcar replacing deceased Edward Platt) and Agent 13 (Joey Forman, replacing Dave Ketchum; Forman had played Harry Hoo in the series); meanwhile, Get Smart, Again! featured all of the surviving original cast reprising their roles. The tone and feel of Get Smart, Again! were also closer to that of the 1960s TV series, especially as it was written and produced by Leonard Stern, co-producer of the original Get Smart. It also ignored completely the continuity established in The Nude Bomb, such as the renaming of CONTROL as PITS (Provisional Intelligence Tactical Service). (Although as CONTROL is said to have disbanded in the 1970s, it's not impossible for both CONTROL and PITS to co-exist in the Get Smart universe.) The twins (boy and girl) that 99 gave birth to in the late 1960s were ignored in the film, but mentioned briefly in the TV-movie.

Barbara Feldon's character, 99, makes a reference to THRUSH, the evil organization in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., a show on which Feldon once guest-starred.

Get Smart, Again! also reprises the television program's original theme music and opening credit sequence, which were absent from The Nude Bomb. In this case, however, the corridors were covered in cobwebs and the phone-booth elevator that led to CONTROL headquarters worked in reverse, causing Smart to be thrown to the top of the booth.

Maxwell Smart (Don Adams), acting as a protocol officer since CONTROL was disbanded in the early 1970s, is reactivated as a counterintelligence agent by Commander Drury (Kenneth Mars) of the United States Intelligence Agency. KAOS, long considered defunct, has been revitalized by a corporate takeover. Its first scheme involves turning a forgotten American scientist and using his weather control machine to extort US$250 billion from the United States Government. (This plot is similar to the one used in the 1990s Avengers movie, another film based on a 1960s TV spy series.)

Drury, convinced that only Smart has the expertise to combat KAOS, gives him carte blanche to reactivate former CONTROL agents to assist him in his task. Along with Drury's bumbling aide, Beamish (Steve Levitt), Smart recruits Larrabee (who, believing that he was under orders from Richard Nixon to stay at his post until relieved, has been living in his office in the now-abandoned CONTROL headquarters tending his office plants), Agent 13, Hymie the Robot (now employed as a crash test dummy) and ultimately, his wife 99 (Barbara Feldon) to find the security leak that allowed the scientist to defect, locate the weather machine and disarm it. They are opposed by a KAOS mole (John de Lancie) within the USIA, who is able to predict Max's every move with the aid of stolen copies of 99's unpublished memoirs.

The visible head of the KAOS scheme is revealed to be Max's old nemesis, Siegfried (Bernie Kopell), but he is merely the agent of a higher executive whom even he has never met. This new leader is finally revealed as Nicholas Demente (Harold Gould), 99's publisher, who intends not only to extort the money but also to create weather that will keep people eternally indoors and interfere with television reception, forcing millions of Americans to entertain themselves by buying Demente's books and publications. Max, 99, and Beamish infiltrate KAOS with the aide of Siegfried's twin brother Doctor Helmut Schmelding. After defeating Demente's henchmen with medieval weaponry, the CONTROL agents kill Demente with his own weather machine. Max and 99 celebrate by causing it to snow.