Inspector Gadget Film Review

Now then Disney fans the company has alot of live action films some are great and others not so much. The film i'm about to review today is another example of a bad cartoon to live action adaptation thus proving that even Disney themselves can't even make a good live action adaptation of a cartoon show altho this is one of a few to actually get a sequel so then ladies and gents here is my review of the film version of Inspector Gadget.

The plot of the film is someone has stolen a robotic foot and kidnapped scientist Dr. Artemus Bradford and so it's up to Gadget here named Jonathan Brown to find out who it is and put a stop to their evil crime. Yeah i've you've seen any episode of the show no scratch that if you've seen the intro to the show you know who the bad guy is and as for the actual story it's a joke because it's so freaking basic it feels like it was written by a computer and not by an actual human being.

Starring in the film is That's A Lot Of Fish as Jonathan "John" Brown/Inspector Gadget/Robo-Gadget , Rupert Everett as Sanford Scolex/Dr. Claw , Joely Fisher as Dr. Brenda Bradford/RoboBrenda , Buffy's younger sister Dawn as Penny Brown , Dabney Coleman as Chief Frank Quimby III , D. L. Hughley as the voice of the Gadgetmobile , Michael G. Hagerty as Syke and original series actor Don Adams as the voice of Brain.

I'm being honest here the acting in the film is perhaps the best part of the film that doesn't mean that the acting is any good it just means it's the least bad thing in the film. There is at least some small effort put into the acting even if all of that effort is wasted on a terrible script and terrible directing it's still there and you can tell that the actors are having fun playing these characters which for me is always a good sign.

This film looks at everything the show was about it and decides to throw it all the away take for example Dr. Claw. In the original show you never saw his face at all thus adding some mystery as to who he really is here tho you can see his face for the whole film so there's no mystery and because you know it's Claw there's no mystery as to who the bad guy hence why I didn't bother editing the name because anyone who sees this film is going to know who the bad guy is just based of the show.

They even oddly enough get the character of Penny wrong in the show she was always the smartest person in the room often solving the crime before her uncle did. Here tho because they made Gadget less goofy Penny comes of as a typical kid something she never was in the show heck we don't even see her invent anything until the mid-credits by which point it's to late and you can forget about seeing her massive computer thing she always had that's not even mentioned.

Now I will admit the CGI by Dream Quest Images isn't that bad at least in a few scenes the issue is it's not that good in alot of scenes. Which for me is a huge issue because by design this is a huge effects movie because there's no way in hell you could do an Inspector Gadget movie and not have a ton of effects and so you'd think that more effort would have been put into making all of the effects look good to which you'd be wrong because only a small amount of them look passable where the rest the look really bad.

For those wondering the picture above is an example of one of the good CGI shots and since this is an Inspector Gadget movie we have to talk about Gadget himself, Instead of the bumbling , goofy cop from the original show that we all fell in love with instead he's an actually competent cop which while it does sound good it's not because like I said it makes Penny bad because it was in her character to be the competent one with Gadget being the goofy one.

Let's take a second to talk about the transitions in this film because yeah for the first time ever i'm going to talk about them.They are really freaking annoying and they happen every few minuets I have no idea why they chose to have the transitions happen that often or why they chose to make them as annoying as they did but there honestly enough to put people of watching the film that's how bad they are.

There's also a romance angle which is just pointless because it adds nothing to either the characters or the actual film it's just there for no reason what so ever. This adaptation is really bad it honestly makes you wonder how they could make something this bad when it writes itself Inspector Gadget goes on a mission to stop Claw boom the end that's all you need you don't need to do an origin story or a romance angle because that's not what the fans want the fans want the cartoon in live action form and Disney of all people had the chance to do just that heck they even had the money to do it but chose not to.

Now as a James Bond fans I loved seeing both Richard Kiel pretty much return to the role Of Jaws from The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker altho it does make one wonder if this movie and the the Roger Moore James Bond films are now connected. Yes I do know that Oddjob does also appear in this film but he's not played by his original actor and so he doesn't count at least in my humble opinion.

This is an action comedy and so one would expect there to be plenty of jokes in this film and you'd be right there are jokes but not all of them are funny. The ones that aren't funny are all of the reference jokes that they do because they point them out to you as if you don't understand the joke and that just makes them really unfunny but that being said D. L. Hughley does get one or two funny lines but nothing that really sticks out.

This is also an action film and so that does mean that we have to talk about the action scenes which like the rest of the film aren't that good. I'm not going to lie and say that the show had good action scenes mostly because I don't remember if they did or not but they had the excuse of being made on a smaller budget so if the action scenes in the show are bad you can at least understand why here tho there's no excuse for all of the lazy action and the lazy attempts at comedy.

Overall while I do say that Dragonball Evolution is the worst adaptation out there this has to crack the top 10 easily it gets so many things wrong about the characters but at the same time it is still an enjoyable film but not for the right reasons and so the film gets a 4.5 out of 10 from me and yeah the editing is really bad as well and when I say bad I really mean bad i've seen better editing in Dragonball Evolution.