Written by: Ron Anderson, William Robertson, Alex Zamm
Starring: French Stewart, Elaine Hendrix, Tony Martin, Caitlin Wachs, Sigrid Thornton
Rating: [1/5]
Nearly every manufactured product runs the risk of becoming obsolete when a new upgrade becomes available. Just ask all of the iPhones in the landfills that get tossed away when the new and shiny ones make their way to the marketplace. This inevitably happens with inanimate objects but Inspector Gadget 2 combines this with a human infused with gadgets who now runs the risk of no longer serving his purpose. Featuring a questionable romance and a tiring plot, this film displays more of the same but somehow worse.
With the desire to create an upgraded version of Inspector Gadget (French Stewart), the police department have unveiled their new creation, G2 (Elaine Hendrix), who is a full robot cop who can do everything much better. Causing an existential issue for Inspector Gadget, he still tries to prove his worth while Dr. Claw (Tony Martin) and his crew devise a new plan for some big time crime.
Opening the film with an acknowledgement of crime being at an all-time low in the town leading to Inspector Gadget being so bored he decides to try and pull over an old woman driving one mile over the speed limit sure felt like a choice. Combining that with the jive-speaking voice of the car, which represents the only Black representation this film and its predecessor would dare display set everything up for what proves as another terrible film featuring this character. However, at the very least it provides some new material and a romance Inspector Gadget has with a robot.
Getting at the root of why the police department would want G2 does have some troubling elements when you think about it for more than one second. They seek to remove all humanity from police work and make something that will apply nothing other than calculations to determine the appropriate step. Moving away from Inspector Gadget, who for all of his nonsense, still applies some humanity to the work he does displays the way this police department wants to go towards. Does the film adequately explore any of that? Well, of course not considering this is a direct-to-DVD sequel of an already disastrous film that could not even get Matthew Broderick and Michelle Trachtenberg to reprise their roles. This feature had all of the makings of a worse version of an already terrible film and it somehow accomplished the feat of doing so against all of the odds given the degree of difficulty of getting worse to what came before but leave it to the Inspector Gadget franchise to find a way.
As for some semblance of a plot, we have Inspector Gadget trying to prove himself to G2 as he has grown romantic feelings for this robot and then Dr. Claw trying to do something that would allow him to steal from the city’s reserves. Everything with Dr. Claw represents the same flaccid villainy with nothing interesting to explore but Inspector Gadget’s infatuation with a fully autonomous robot does raise some red flags. The film wants to make this a seamless romance because Inspector Gadget has all of these tools that appear out of him but the man still has a human conscience by all meaning he has no natural reason to fall in love with this robot other than they created her to look attractive as Elaine Hendrix was. Considering how G2 operates and interacts with others, it just raises questions of what exactly does inspector Gadget find attractive about this fully realized robot that this film certainly had no intention of really answering.
Inspector Gadget 2 really does not offer much of anything to attach to when looking for quality in all forms of evaluating a feature film. The CGI utilized in displaying the tools and gadgets at the disposal of the characters look even worse, we have worse actors than the previous film, and such an uneventful plot at the center of it all. The only element that could raise some interest comes from the questioning of this romance between Inspector Gadget and G2 but this feature had no interest because the robot looks like a pretty girl. Just an unfortunate film from top to bottom, not offering anything worth any further examination other than acknowledging this character does not work in live-action and these two films have more than proven that.
Films with Josh 
