Today’s quick review: Inspector Gadget. A security guard (Matthew Broderick) is injured in the line of duty and gets reconstructed as Inspector Gadget, a robotic police officer with a wide array of cartoonish tools at his disposal. After a brief adjustment period, he then goes up against Claw, a fiendish CEO who plans to use robotics for evil. Along the way, Gadget learns to be a better parent to his niece Penny and finds love with Brenda, the surgeon responsible for his transformation.
Inspector Gadget is a lightweight, slapstick comedy that falls flat on its face. Its chief strengths are the silliness of Gadget’s tools and the charm of its characters, but both of these are mismanaged and are unsatisfying. Slapstick requires a fine touch to make it look natural, but the bungling in Inspector Gadget feels jarringly intentional. Likewise, reasonable concepts for characters and their relationships are let down by simplistic dialogue and flat acting. The movie also proceeds at a feverish pace, burning through what plot it has in a mere 80 minutes.
Overall, Inspector Gadget works well enough as a kids’ film but isn’t worth revisiting as an adult. There are a few good ideas here—cartoon gadgets, the relationship between Penny and Gadget, and the Robo Gadget doppelganger fight—but the execution is too silly to take advantage of them. Skip it. 4.1 out of 10 on IMDB.