PeterMahoney1989 I grew up watching Inspector Gadget. It was, and still is, one of my favorite cartoons. So you can imagine my excitement when I heard they were making a live action version. Even better it was being done by Disney. So I had some pretty high hopes. But the film has ruined the reputation of the wonderful cartoon.The casting in my opinion was horrible. Mathew Broderick was a horrible choice to play the inspector. Even worse is when they tried to give him a love story. He was suppose to be a bumbling comedic idiot and they took all it away from him. But if anything, the one thing that was terrible about the movie was that it was a feature movie. Inspector Gadget was a silly Saturday morning cartoon. The movie was too serious, too overdone, had too much of a plot and wasn't even remotely as funny.Tip for those who haven't seen it: NEVER see it. EVER. Watch the cartoon, it's a true classic.

PhilipVier Some films are just unbelievably bad. It makes you wonder who thought it would a good idea to produce such rubbish. Well, Inspector Gadget is one of those films.This film is really terrible. It's so terrible that there can't possibly be any good things in it, because they're overshadowed by the bad ones. The film hardly contains a story. It's more like a succession of horribly edited scenes, filled with stupid slapstick, and accompanied by horrible acting. Matthew Broderick plays Inspector Gadget and gives possibly the worst performance of his career, which is saying a lot in his case. The villain is played by Rupert Everett, who completely ignores the Doctor Claw character in the cartoon, and gives one of the worst performances in cinematic history. Throughout the whole film he just acts like a homosexual mental patient. All the other actors are hardly worth mentioning. Most of them are terrible and add nothing to the film.The one thing that's really exceptional about this film is the editing. It looks like it was done by someone who just had a lobotomy. In some scenes it feels like you entered right in the middle, and that a part of it was just cut out. The film also has some idiotic transitions between scenes, that are supposed to be funny, but are just completely pointless.Nothing about this movie is funny or even remotely entertaining. I know it's for children, but it's all just stupid, cheap slapstick with horrible, over the top acting. This is like someone took the Inspector Gadget cartoon, chopped it up, burned it, marinated it in diarrhoea, called it a motion picture, and served it to the audience. Don't bother watching it, unless you're in a masochistic mood.

Steve Pulaski When you want to see a horrid bastardization of a TV series, you should look no further than Inspector Gadget. It's so bad and disheartening to its fanbase that I can't recall the last time I've seen a children's film so wretched and unpleasant. It's the kind of picture that is so flamboyantly bad that, after a while, you begin to cringe at the material and begin to drum up ideas on how you could've repaired its broken nature and saved thousands of people from enduring such unspeakable madness.For starters, let's get this plot out of the way. Matthew Broderick is John Brown, a rent-a-cop security guard who patrols outside the building where two scientists, Brenda (Joely Fisher) and her father (René Auberjonois) are working to construct artificial limbs than can be operated through mind control. The possibilities of such technology catch the attention of Sandford Scolex (also known as "Dr. Claw" and played by Rupert Everett), who steals the functioning limb with plans to replicate it and use it to evil's advantage. Brown, who gets in a horrific car accident while trying to catch Claw, has irreparable tissue damage that can only be fixed by having alternate, technological gizmos put into his body effectively making him "Inspector Gadget." It's now up to him and his sly daughter Penny (a young Michele Trachtenberg) to stop him, allow justice to prevail, etc.The first problem is the pacing itself; the film moves so fast and so quickly that it could be the direct blame for young children with lower attention spans. The action is manic, the overall material choppy and inconsistent, and with situations happening too abruptly to be taken seriously and ending too quickly with no payoff. Poor Broderick is at the center of this absolute madness, thrown into so many messy, incoherent instances with no rhyme or reason, I can see him going home from the set, everyday, a disgruntled mess that would slave over a bottle of hard liquor.The second major issue here is the writing, which is worst I've seen in a children's film in a while. For once, it's not for its immaturity, as most films targeted at the youth demographic succeed in, but just for the stench of desperation this film has no problem letting loose. It tries every possible thing, even resorting to disjointed, second-long credit cookies at the end of the picture trying to leave the audience giggling at something. I laughed not a single time during the course of this film; desperation is almost never funny and that alone should be the encompassing message of Inspector Gadget.There's a term I use when describing unsubstantial movie affairs for children and that term is "fast food filmmaking." It's films that seem to only exist as a cash-grab for a kids-movie-deprived season, often raking in cash from parents who are looking for a quick little babysitter for their youngsters, and in return, they get a film that does nothing but that. Instead of giving them lovable characters, entertaining and memorable fun, and a keenly wrapped moral, they are given nothing but uncreative, unfunny drudgery.This is a painful exercise to say the least. The imagination that could've spawned a wonderful adaptation of Inspector Gadget is halted by desperately unfunny writing, bland acting, awkward and frantic pacing, and to add one more nail into one more coffin, the transfer from animation to live-action. With the limited the knowledge of the Inspector Gadget TV series that I have, I can say the charm seemed to stem from the limitless possibilities that could be done thanks to the likes of 2D animation. Nudging that eclectic and visually-visceral world into the live-action world simply doesn't translate well. The dizzying sound effects, exhausting use of computer-generated gags, and tiresome slapstick instances never amount to anything aside from frustration and true tedium. With that in mind, and the fact that they completely skewed the villain of the series and provided everything with a shamelessly half-baked treatment goes to show that this particular cinematic gadget needs more than a few tweaks; it needs reprogramming.Starring: Matthew Broderick, Rupert Everett, Joely Fisher, Michelle Trachtenberg, Dabney Coleman, and D. L. Hughley. Directed by: Dave Kellogg.

Johnny H. Inspector Gadget sucks so hard I don't even know where to begin. For starters, this movie is ONLY meant for VERY YOUNG kids. Even if that is so, they would probably have a hard time enjoying the visuals. This is one of the ugliest family movies ever made. The humour is humourless and dry, the acting is just bad, and for a kids movie, it sure is pretty dark. Disney screwed up big time with this soulless movie. Matthew Broderick was cast as the most annoying character possible: the title character himself. His character gets "fixed" after an accident; he is turned into a robot (at the beginning of the movie), or a cyborg, or something that we couldn't possibly care about.Also another thing in the movie is that Dr. Claw, the villain in the original Inspector Gadget TV show who never reveals his face, is clearly visible on screen most of the time, and he's just an ordinary looking guy. Nothing works in this movie. The show was never owned by Disney in the first place, but they bought the film rights to the show and lowered the show to Disney- fied levels. I never watched the show growing up, but I have seen some episodes and they were a lot better than the movie, even though the episodes were pretty standard.Avoid this piece of rubbish at all costs. It isn't worth your time or money. It deserves to rot away and be forgotten.