Is ‘Get Smart’ the best of the worst?

What happened

Get Smart, starring Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart in the remake of the 1960s TV show, took the number one spot at the box office over the weekend, bringing in $39.2 million and beating its rival comedy, The Love Guru, starring Mike Myers, which came in fourth and earned just $14 million. Although most analysts expected Get Smart to beat The Love Guru, both films received mixed-to-poor reviews from many critics. (Reuters)

What the commentators said

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“Forget any of the other weekend box office wars of the year,” said Stuart Heritage in the blog Heckler Spray, this past weekend “saw the battle of the disappointingly underwhelming puerile comedies.” This just wasn’t a very exciting fight—it was just one “critically reviled movie” against another.

But it makes sense that Get Smart won, said Mark Caro in the Chicago Tribune blog Pop Machine. “The reviews for Get Smart weren’t nearly as brutal as those for The Love Guru.” Still, this is nothing to celebrate. Now Warner Bros. is probably “thinking franchise and will start pumping out the sequels,” which “bums me out, because I don’t want Carell to waste any more time on such broad, toothless material.”

I actually thought The Incredible Hulk was going to take the top spot at the box office again, said Aaron Lafferty in a WoodTV.com blog. “But my gut feeling that Get Smart would do better than The Love Guru was correct—although I didn’t think it would do THAT much better!” At least Get Smart and The Love Guru will push You Don’t Mess Wit the Zohan further out of the picture.

Get Smart may have won the box office this weekend, said Bob Thompson in the National Post blog The Ampersand, but that doesn’t mean The Love Guru is destined to be a complete failure. Austin Powers was “hammered critically and mostly ignored in theaters” when it came out—“fans and reviewers didn’t get the Powers picture until well after it came out on” video. So, who knows: “The Love Guru “might be rediscovered later.”