The Nude Bomb (1980)

There are a lot of reasons why the “Get Smart” movie The Nude Bomb doesn’t work, and possibly the fact that it wasn’t funny is only the most obvious.  Timing may have been a factir.  Much of the success of Get Smart lay in the current popularity of James Bond, so when the show was on the air from 1965 to 1970, the tenure of the Bond films belonged to Sean Connery.  His Bond films were serious enough and often so unintentionally silly that they were ripe for parody.  Yet, by the time of The Nude Bomb, the tenure belonged to Roger Moore and the last film to be released before this comedy was Moonraker – noted as one of the silliest of the entire series.

After Bond adopted ski stunts, skydiving stunts, a fat southern sheriff and the metal-mouthed menace of Richard Kiel’s Jaws, it was obvious that the hip-cool of Bond had slipped into the arena of stupid gags.  What, at that point, could Maxwell Smart do to Bond that Roger Moore hadn’t already done?

Plus, this is largely a television production, and it shows.  Audiences are pretty savvy when it comes to spotting television values in their movies.  In order for it to work, it needed to be bigger and even more insane than anything Moore’s team could come up with.  Instead, The Nude Bomb relies heavily on tired old gags wrenched from the show.  It’s television writing stretched to feature-length and it shows.