Inspector Gadget

Bomb Rating: 

What exactly does a guy have to do to suggest to Disney that hiring him to direct is an exceedingly poor idea -- take a big, steaming shit on Michael Eisner's face?

I wore jeans to this film knowing full well that there was going to be some serious shifting about, but little did I know that I'd twitch so much I'd melt the denim right into my ass. "Inspector Gadget" is the kind of film that's so disjointed, so impossible to watch, that the ADD kids in the audience were crying out in unison for their parents to take them home for some "Masterpiece Theater." What was the most common phrase I heard walking out of the theater? "Mommy and Daddy are sorry."

I'm not one to use profanity very often, but this fiasco rates so high on the "fuck me" scale that I can't help myself. The director of this movie is David Kellogg. His only other credit is the 1991 film "Cool as Ice" starring, you guessed it, Vanilla Ice. What exactly does a guy have to do to suggest to Disney that hiring him to direct is an exceedingly poor idea -- take a big, steaming shit on Michael Eisner's face? All I could figure was that Kellogg offered pictures of a nude Jeffrey Katzenberg abusing handicapped children or something.

You can imagine how bad this film is when I say that Matthew Broderick isn't even the worst thing in it. Take the finale, when Inspector Gadget's (Broderick) niece, Penny (Michelle Trachtenberg), enters the Claw's (Rupert Everett) lair by the door and then Kellogg cuts to her sliding in through a chute. Frankly, the only way I would measure success with this film is by how many lawsuits it spawns. It steals lines and scenes from other movies so blatantly that video rental places may pull copies of "Mission: Impossible" and "Top Gun" from their shelves just so people aren't reminded of "Inspector Gadget."

It's really a miracle that there wasn't some kind of Jonestown-type suicide epidemic after the initial screenings of this film. How did the filmmakers live with themselves? It's like that Sprite commercial where the movie is planned out before the script is written, except that the "Inspector Gadget" script was written around Skittles, Yahoo, VW and McDonald's ads. This was 82 minutes of my life that I'd eat one of my own arms to get back.

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