It’s too easy to dismiss “Get Smart,” the latest in an unending series of latter-day cinematic adaptations of TV Americana, as a film that barely exists beyond its own pitch — “Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart.” It’s also too true. Mr. Carell, the modern master of meshing comic innocence (“The 40-Year-Old Virgin”) with unction (NBC’s ongoing and surprisingly sure-footed remake of “The Office”) is indeed perfectly cast in the part of bumbling, snarky, and sweetly enduring secret agent 86, a three-time Emmy-winning role originated by the late comedian and impressionist Don Adams. Unfortunately, Mr. Carell’s performance is frankly just about all that “Get Smart” has to recommend it.

In an effort, perhaps, to purge the spirits of a prior, undistinguished big-screen version of “Get Smart” (1980’s “The Nude Bomb”) and Fox’s dreadful 1995 network reboot starring Andy Dick, the producer Charles Roven has aped his successful formula for franchise restoration with “Batman Begins” by also making “Get Smart” an origin film of sorts. Mr. Carell’s Maxwell Smart is an intelligence analyst for a super-secret American spy agency called CONTROL, and he dreams of becoming a fully fledged field agent. Max may reassure himself and his geek squad that they are “where the real work gets done” — at computer monitors in a subterranean headquarters hidden beneath the Smithsonian — but the envious looks and longing sighs with which he greets Agent 23 (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), a ruthlessly arrogant man of action, say otherwise.

But when Max shows up at work one morning to discover CONTROL’s ranks significantly thinned at the behest of villainous KAOS agent Siegfried (a woefully miscast Terrence Stamp standing in for the original series’ Bernie Kopell), CONTROL’s chief (Alan Arkin) grants Max a battlefield promotion. The Chief also pairs Max with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), a lethal and beautiful rising star at CONTROL who initially questions her eager but inexperienced partner’s qualifications to protect and serve on the QT. Siegfried’s terrorist conspiracy points first to the White House and then to Los Angeles, where the film billows into a noisy climax that feels more in tune with a remake of “SWAT” or “The FBI” than a retooled, small-screen spy satire.

Although “Get Smart” bears plot traces of Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor” and an outright co-opting of a sky-diving fight scene in Lewis Gilbert’s 1977 James Bond trifle “The Spy Who Loved Me,” the film, at heart, is more of a high school nerds vs. jocks comedy than a tongue-in-cheek action film. Agent 23 stands in for the popular high school quarterback; the Chief plays the patient father figure; 99 is the initially unobtainable smart girl, and “Heroes” star Masi Oka and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” vet Nate Torrance are the ostensible campus bullies. It’s not a good fit. There’s something frankly disquieting about a contemporary movie that deals with American Homeland Security anxiety entirely in terms of adolescent ego, even if it’s a comedy. At least director Peter Segal and his writers had the good sense not to stage any of the action in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Mr. Carell explores the material within its shallow limits and, thanks in part to his chemistry with fellow “Little Miss Sunshine” alumnus Mr. Arkin, makes it to the credits with his dignity mostly intact. Ms. Hathaway, however, is essentially tossed to the lowest-common-denominator storytelling wolves in a part that courts none of the late-’60s sitcom war-of-the-sexes zeitgeist that the late Barbara Feldon embodied so effectively when “Get Smart” aired three and a half decades ago.

While this “Get Smart” includes requisite appearances from original cast members (such as Mr. Kopell), as well as cameos by Bill Murray and Patrick Warburton (who takes on the gold-interpreting Hymie the robot) in series-inspired character bits, it fails to rise above the level of a boardroom story conference. Content to go nowhere, “Get Smart” gently grinds series creators Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s barbed borscht-belt absurdism and satire into blandly palatable anachronistic mush.