THE AISLE SEAT - "INSPECTOR GADGET"
by Mike McGranaghan
Matthew Broderick plays the title character in Inspector Gadget, a movie version of the popular cartoon show. The film - with its endlessly wacky special effects - wants to succeed in the vein of the Jim Carrey comedy The Mask, but it lacks any kind of innovation or imagination. The result is appallingly bad, the kind of family movie that rots your childrens' brains.
As it opens, Broderick is a mild-mannered security guard named John Brown. He is nearly killed defending a scientist (Joely Fisher) on whom he has a crush. She just happens to be working on a robotics experiment and needs a subject. And so she fills his body with a wide array of gizmos (springs, helicopter blades, even a Pez dispenser), which he then uses to fight crime. His primary target is an evil tycoon named Claw (Rupert Everett) who also killed the woman's father and stole the robotic foot he was working on.
Inspector Gadget could have been a hip, smart live-action cartoon like George of the Jungle was a few years back. However, the filmmakers were in such a hurry to get to the punchlines that they couldn't be bothered to properly set up the jokes. This movie is way too fast, the editing so manic that it's like the movie swallowed a bottle of caffeine pills. You never have any time to digest a scene before three more speed by. There's no pacing, just a dizzying barrage of belabored scenes thrown at you Uzi-style. I'm not sure what the rush was. Why couldn't director David Kellogg slow down and let the movie breathe, or maybe develop any one of its multiple storylines? You get the feeling that everyone involved with this project just wanted to go home, so they rushed through everything at top speed. What else can you say about a movie whose end credits start rolling an hour and ten minutes after it starts?
Just as bad is that the picture is filled with obvious slapstick gags: a man's toupee is ripped off, a Japanese person makes a Godzilla reference, another man sustains a blow to the crotch, etc. If I have to see one more crotch injury played for laughs in a movie, I'm going to scream. The writing here is just as lazy as can be. Maybe a computer wrote it. Maybe someone fed all the various elements of slapstick comedy into a computer and this is what it spit out. Then Disney hired a director with Attention Deficit Disorder (a Michael Bay for the family set) to film it. Then they got Edward Scissorhands to handle the editing chores. Yeah, that's what must have happened. It can be the only explanation for this embarrassing mess.
I haven't yet mentioned the so-called Gadgetmobile, an annoying car that constantly talks in a grating hip-hop patter and shoots Skittles candies (the voluminous number of blatant product placements in this picture is infuriating). The car is supposed to be funny, but I kept hoping that it would get wiped out by an oncoming train.
The special effects are admittedly sometimes clever. I liked all the little gizmos that the character has tucked away in his coat. I wish I had a Pez dispenser that would pop out of my finger. However, all the special effects in the world can't compensate for the fact that this is just poorly done and filled with insultingly unfunny jokes. Watching Inspector Gadget is like being bludgeoned to death with a rubber chicken.
(
1/2 out of four)
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