Steve Carell replaces the late Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, an assiduous and super-dull analyst pushing for agent status with Control, a secret force of underworld spooks working for Uncle Sam and battling the forces of Kaos.

Naturally, while he lacks the requirements for the job, he eventually gets his big break when the remaining Control agents are compromised and their identities revealed.

Soon Max, as Agent 86, is teamed with sexy and deadly Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) and blundering his way through the espionage world.

The premise of Get Smart – taken wholesale from the original show – is that Max is a walking disaster area. Carell plays him as a deadpan, super-serious wannabe with no real clue just how useless he is. Hathaway, long-legged and glam, is his foil.

As directed by Peter Segal, the film emerges as a curious hybrid of old-style slapstick and modern gung-ho action thriller. The trick is that
no-one takes it remotely seriously, and so it's good to see veterans like Alan Arkin, Terence Stamp and James Caan drifting through the proceedings. There is also a blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameo from Bill Murray as Agent 13, hiding inside a tree.

There are some inspired moments of painful humour, not least a sequence in a plane toilet involving a miniature crossbow. But while the picture boasts more laugh-out-loud gags than Steve Martin's remake of The Pink Panther, it still misses the sleekness and style of the TV show, which was created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry.

Steve Carell is working hard to become the next big thing in US film comedy. Like Rowan Atkinson with Johnny English, he may now have found his calling and his metier in this bumbling
spy – a cack-handed patriot with more than a hint of Norman Wisdom.

One thing is for certain: Get Smart is 1,000 times better than the execrable Evan Almighty, the $200 million turkey that could have sunk Carell's boat before it even left the slipway. This one is far from perfect but there are flashes of innovation that will see most audiences through to the explosive finale.