The best and worst of TV show-inspired movies
"Get Smart" hails from a long line of motion pictures based on popular television shows. Once studio executives discovered that TV titles slapped on movies created an instant audience, there would be no stopping the adaptations, for better or worse.
So, here are five of the better and five of the worse examples of motion pictures based on television programs. Weirdly enough, four of the better five all have significant Chicagoland connections.
The best
I. "The Untouchables" - Director Brian De Palma (and screenwriter David Mamet) refashioned the 1950s Chicago gangster series as an updated western with Kevin Costner playing the naive lawman from out of town come to clean up corruption. Sean Connery won the Oscar for his Windy City beat-cop-turned-Untouchable.
2. "The Brady Bunch Movie" - Former Chicagoan Betty Thomas directs an inspired comedy that answers the question: What if the singing Brady family was stuck the '70s even though they're living in 1995? Park Ridge native Gary Cole performs a dead-on rendition of Highland Park native Robert Reed's original TV dad, Mike Brady.
3. "The Blues Brothers" - The BB didn't have a show of their own; John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd created the duo as a "Saturday Night Live" short. Chicago-born John Landis directs a slam-bam musical ode to the Windy City, one with the unmitigated moxie to have its two main stars constantly wear impenetrable Ray-Bans. Co-starring a Mount Prospect police cruiser as the Bluesmobile.
4. "The Fugitive" - Shot in Chicago and directed by former Chicagoan Andy Davis, this remake of the classic TV series puts Chicago-born Harrison Ford in David Janssen's fleeing shoes as a prominent doctor falsely accused of killing his wife.
5. "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" - I can't even say the title of the funniest musical number in this sick, twisted, envelope-pushing assault of bad taste based on the barrier-busting animated series by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The love scene between Satan and Saddam Hussein? No comment.
The worst
1. "The Avengers" - The wonderfully wry and ridiculously surrealistic British secret agent series starring Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee becomes a jaw-droppingly bad brain-freeze starring Uma Thurman and Ralph Fiennes. Why couldn't Sean Connery have retired before appearing as the villain in this amalgam of muck?
2. "Wild Wild West" - The wonderfully wry and ridiculously surrealistic American Western secret agent series starring Robert Conrad and Ross Martin becomes a tedious, backfiring pile of dumbness starring Will Smith and Kevin Kline as U.S. Grant's elite secret service team. Kenneth Branagh went from Shakespeare to this mess?
3. "The Flintstones: Viva Rock Vegas" - This sequel to 1994's "The Flintstones" replaced John Goodman (Fred) and Rick Moranis (Barney) with Mark Addy and Stephen Baldwin, and that's just for starters on the list of things that went wrong with this unpalatable, boring stake through the heart of the original Hanna-Barbera show.
4. "Star Trek: The Final Frontier" - William Shatner, not to be outdone by his longtime co-star Leonard Nimoy for directing the two previous "Star Trek" movies, finagled his way into the director's chair on this fifth voyage of the USS Enterprise, easily the silliest and most disappointing entry in the captain's big-screen log.
5. "Reno 9ll: Miami" - As if the juvenile cop show on Comedy Central weren't dopey enough, this movie adaptation is like a big bowl of cold linguine coagulating on the silver screen. So stilted and awful, it makes "improv" a dirty word,