Inspector Gadget

Inspector Gadget, you may recall, was an animated TV series (a French, Canadian and American co-production) in the 1980s. Gadget was a bumbling, Clouseau-like police inspector equipped with various bionic attachments (go! go! gadget!) who thought he was solving crimes when in fact his niece Penny and trusty dog Brain were doing all the work. It was cute and fun, but fans of the show (and everyone else) should steer clear of this Hollywood live-action movie version, as there’s no evidence of either cuteness or humour at all here.
Broderick – so funny in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but for this he must have given his comic skills the year off – is the security guard who is transformed into Inspector Gadget with an array of attachments including stilts and skis. Unfortunately bad guy Sanford Scolex (Everett, going so wildly over the top you have to admire his nerve) has built an evil robot that looks just like our hero and it’s on the rampage. Snore. It’s all very silly without being very amusing, and pretty slow and dull, considering it’s less than an hour and a half long.