Well, I went to see this without high expectations but it was this or Hellboy 2 and the prospect of the combination of Ron Perlman and Selma Blair sounds almost precisely like my personal idea of hell, so it wasn't really a tough decision. The plot set up changes a couple of times over the first 20 minutes or so (as it goes one way then borrows from the opening of Three Days of the Condor) but it's basically Steve Carell as Max Smart (hence the awful pun of the title), who teams up with Anne Hathaway's Agent 99 to go on a mission in Russia for "Control" (an American governmental spy outfit).
It starts off very slowly, jokes fall flat and it is very obvious you have these actors standing there trying to be funny and it seems that a very painful two hours is about to unfold. Thankfully however, once the rigmarole of getting the set up of the plot done is out of the way, when they get to Carell and Hathaway on the mission it does kick in as their relationship is the film. It's very silly humour but it gets funnier the longer it goes, Alan Arkin's performance as the chief is emblematic of this as he starts off very blandly but is extremely amusing by the end.
Despite it being clearly a double-act, this is the Steve Carell show. This is not to say Hathaway is bad, she's perfectly fine, but she's primarily there to wear (or attempt to wear) as many revealing costumes as possible. Carell though is having a lot of fun with this and even when it doesn't work you can sense what he's trying to do. Once he gets Anne on his own he sparks off her nicely and the silliness just flows. Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) does nicely, as does Terrence Stamp, the cast are uniformly decent.
The problem is though that the story is supremely predictable and therefore you can see the plot and characters' future developments well before the halfway mark. The film is put together in the way you'd expect from this kind of Hollywood fare and the score in particular is well done. So a bit of a mixed bag as it starts slowly, but does entertain consistently, possesses a few laugh-out-loud moments and is quite fun for the majority of the running time. Nothing revelatory but then it doesn't try to be and definitely worth seeing if you're a fan of Carell or of Hathaway's legs.