In the run-up to the release of the Watchmen movie, there have been displays of naked terror at how grossly the movie’s creators will mangle author Alan Moore’s original vision. My first inclination is to snigger at the extremity of these anxieties.

I’ll confess that I don’t view Watchmen with any particular reverence. Comics and I had decided to see other people at the time of its original publication, so I wasn’t at what one could call ground zero. In fact, I didn’t read it until I had started reading comics again and saw its influence being misapplied by creator after creator.

So instead of viewing it as a shot across the bow, it was that comic that spawned a bunch of terrible imitators who thought Watchmen was really cool but generally missed the point and thought its tonal elements were much more portable than they actually were.

Aside from that, just about every movie adaptation of a comic book stands a really good chance of being kind of terrible. (I’ve also largely stopped going to them, because every time there’s a commercial for Iron Man or The Dark Knight or something, my partner gives me a look that plainly says, “This is your fault.” I’ve been feigning deafness when he looks at the new Entertainment Weekly and asks me to explain Watchmen. Fortunately, he’s quickly distracted by the magazine’s sick obsession with Lost.) And really, I’m sure I’ll be to see Dr. Manhattan’s package all over the web within hours of the movie’s premiere, so why subject myself to the unpleasantness of movie attendance (i.e. “Hell is other people”)?

But I’ve been through the pain of botched movie adaptations of properties I love in their original form. Here are some of the worst offenders:

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: When the director of the film says repeatedly and publicly that his guiding principle was to make the shortest Harry Potter film to date, disappointment is inevitable. Still, this seemed more like a show-choir presentation of a musical than any kind of movie – clipped, truncated, and comprehensible only if you’ve read the book, but if you’ve read the book, you’d be really annoyed.

A Chorus Line: Lots and lots of stage musicals have suffered indignities aplenty when translated for the cinema. (Exceptions: The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Chicago.) And while Sir Richard Attenborough made many fine films during his distinguished career, choosing to film a musical about dancers that never actually shows much dancing was probably not a very good idea.

A Little Night Music: I can see the logic of casting Elizabeth Taylor as an adultery-prone actress of a certain age, but not this particular adultery-prone actress of a certain age. And while the role hardly begs for a classically trained set of pipes (Glynis Johns didn’t have them), breathy timidity doesn’t do the songs any favors. (Trivia bonus: Like Hairspray, this is a movie musical based on a stage musical based on a non-musical movie, Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night.)

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: When Clint Eastwood takes a fancy to a book I like, I should just stay away. (I can give him a pass on Mystic River, since I realized after seeing the movie that I wouldn’t have liked the book at all if I’d ever tried to read any of the dialogue aloud, because OUCH.) My clearest memory of Midnight, the movie, is John Cusack mugging desperately in an attempt to convince the audience that something quirky and fascinating was happening. He was entirely alone in that opinion.

The Witches of Eastwick and Steel Magnolias: The Witches of Eastwick is a good novel, and Steel Magnolias is a terrible play, but I’m fond of them both, and neither deserved the star-driven hack jobs they received. (I saw a drag production of Magnolias in a bar once, and it was probably the best staging the play will ever know.)

We went to see Journey to the Center of the Earth yesterday, though none of the cinemas in the area bothered with the 3-D version. It’s not going to change anyone’s life, but it doesn’t waste anyone’s time either. It’s paced well, reasonably charming, and exciting and funny often enough that I didn’t spend any time wondering if people in the other theaters were having a better time. (That’s partly because it’s relatively short.)

The 1959 version was one of the first movies I saw in a theater. (It was in its second release. I’m not that old.) I remember being very impressed, and the new version doesn’t replace it, but I like Brendan Fraser a lot, and I don’t regret the 92 minutes I spent. (How’s that for a poster blurb?)

One thing I did notice was how perfectly Anita Briem embodied what I would call “the new action movie girl.” Briem’s character, mountain guide Hannah Ásgeirsson, is attractive without being unattainable, witty without being castrating, competent without being threatening, and generally a narrative utility player of perfect reliability. I ended up wondering if the producers hooked test audiences up to electrodes to make sure they were getting just the right kind of stimulation from her, refining their new action movie girl formula as they went along. (To keep you from missing their hard work, the screenwriters have Fraser and Briem’s characters keep a non-hostile, running tally of how often they save each other.)

Briem is charming and works hard, and the new action movie girl paradigm is a lot better than the victim-bait construct that was in place for so long, but I did end up wondering how much fun it can be to play a character that’s been conceived so conscientiously.

It was too hot out to mow the lawn on Sunday, and we had free passes, so we went to see a matinee of Get Smart. While the specific alternative was dehydration and heat stroke, there are many other worse ways to spend an afternoon that stop well short of possible hospitalization. I don’t have any personal nostalgia for the original television series. (I always found Don Adams just plain annoying instead of amusingly so, though I realize that probably puts me in the minority.) My partner does remember the show fondly, and he liked the movie too.

I always find it best to wait to see a movie until a couple of weeks after it debuts, especially in the summer. Crowded movie houses increase the possibility of annoying audience behavior, and my tolerance for that has decreased sharply as ticket prices have increased. (Also, I’m a grumpy old man who just wants those damned kids to get off his lawn.) So everyone else was going to Wal-E or Wanted, leaving a small, well-behaved group of audience members to see if there was any point in turning another old television show into a summer movie.

It turns out that it’s a fairly forgiving vehicle when it comes to updating. Steve Carell’s Maxwell Smart is… well… really smart. He’s a meticulous information analyst who finally gets his chance at field work after his intelligence agency, CONTROL, is infiltrated by its opposite number, KAOS. He’s partnered with veteran Agent 99, played by Anne Hathaway. They travel to Russia to find out what KAOS is up to, smoothing out their experience-versus-intuition dynamic along the way.

To indicate how many movies I actually watch, this is the first time I’ve seen Carell in a leading role, and I liked him a lot. He’s got a vulnerability that just about every other comedian-movie star lacks, and it goes beyond neurotic insecurity. I’ve always liked Hathaway, and she’s not bad here, but she doesn’t seem quite able to find many nuances in Agent 99’s cool confidence. I liked her moments of exasperation and bemusement, but I don’t think this role uses her talents and charisma to best advantage. Carell and Hathaway never really hit on credible romantic chemistry, and I wish the filmmakers hadn’t tried to make them, because their co-worker dynamic is plenty persuasive.

The movie is much better when it isn’t paying too much attention to its plot. There’s a wonderful early scene when a group of CONTROL agents are sitting in an emergency conference. The dialogue overlaps in a chatty, office-politics kind of way, and it reassures the viewer that the movie isn’t going to be a collection of underlined jokes and explosions. That the movie ends up in that mode is mitigated by its earlier looseness.

There aren’t all that many sequences that feel belabored, though one has a long string of self-inflicted puncture wounds that I could have done without. And while this is kind of a weird thing to place into the pro column, I was strangely pleased to see that Smart and Agent 99 actually kill people in a rather off-handed way. That kind of thing would normally color a comedy for me, but it works here. It’s also a lot of fun to watch creepy-hunky Dwayne Johnson try and play along with puppyish enthusiasm, but I sort of have a crush on him.

*

We actually left the house five minutes before the movie was supposed to start, and we still got in our seats, popcorn secured, before the last of the commercials had ended and the previews started. I almost fell asleep during the trailer for The Dark Knight, so I can’t imagine what I’d think of the actual movie.

*

What’s with the poster for Mamma Mia? Nobody’s going to see it because of the generic ingénue who’s listed seventh in the credits (though I’m sure she’s lovely), just like nobody went to see The Devil Wears Prada because of Hathaway (charming though she was). They’re going to see Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, and Colin Firth butcher ABBA songs on a beautiful island in Greece. Wise up, Universal.

Am I the only one who found the animated version of Tekkonkinkreet too boring to sit through? I loved the manga, but I thought the film’s pace was plodding.

The Treasure Town backgrounds were gorgeous, and some sequences had the energy I wanted, but the adaptation as a whole seemed to suffer from an excess of reverence. It was like watching a production of a Chekov play helmed by a director who couldn’t accept that it was supposed to be a comedy. (I’ve actually seen very few productions of Chekov plays that were as funny as I thought they should be, come to think of it.) I’m not saying a dearth of humor was the film’s primary failing, but it lacked the kind of messy liveliness I found in the comic.

Or maybe it’s just my ingrained preference for reading comics over watching animated adaptations of them. In comics, I can at least partly set the pace of the experience and fill in the blanks between panels and scenes. At about the 45-minute point, I was desperate for something that didn’t seem meticulously staged, and I started fast-forwarding.