Movie Review: Get Smart's Bruce & Lloyd: Out o Control (2008)

Talk about a mouthful of a title! Get Smart's Bruce & Lloyd: Out of Control (henceforth referred to simply as Bruce & Lloyd) is a sometimes funny, often stale comedy meant to capitalize on the success of the recent Get Smart remake.

Unfortunately, Get Smart was a mediocre comedy to begin with, and thus a throwaway side-project based on the movie was bound to not be mind-blowing. In fact, it's either a testament to Masi Oka and Nate Torrence (Bruce and Lloyd, respectively) or a condemnation of the screenwriters of the main film that Bruce & Lloyd manages to not be that much worse than Get Smart.

Bruce & Lloyd takes place during the same time-frame as Get Smart, but instead of focusing on Agents 99 and 86, it instead focuses on the tech-geeks who make all of the gadgets seen in the main film. Interesting enough idea, but the execution here is so painfully straightforward that it's only mildly enjoyable to watch.

From the start, it's easy to tell that the budget on this was minuscule compared to the $80 million budget that Get Smart had. At times, with the low quality cameras and random joke-cuts, I felt like I was watching a TV pilot rather than a straight-to-DVD film. Like filtering Scrubs through the original Get Smart by way of the Sci-fi channel, but managing to remove most of the laughs along the way.

Both Oka and Torrence do a serviceable acting job (Torrence is especially funny when his character is attempting to practice flirting with a receptionist), which is more than can be said for most of the supporting cast (Marika Dominczyk is especially wooden, with an accent that is so obviously forced that it provides more laughs than any of the jokes her character makes).

In addition, the story about corrupt politicians from "Maraguay," a fictional South American country, seems unnecessary to the film, even though it's the main plot. It's hard to really care about what's going on, and it's even harder to find out why all the political intrigue was added to the subplot when there's no payoff for it in the end.

For a marketing ploy, Bruce & Lloyd could've been a lot worse. Taken without that context, however, it just feels like a TV show that would be bumped after three episodes so more Dancing with the Stars could make it's way onto our TVs. Maybe if it had been made with a larger budget and without being looked at as a throw-away project, Bruce & Lloyd could've been good. Too bad that's not what happened.

Rating: 5/10