YMMV / Inspector Gadget (1999)

• Adorkable: John/Gadget might be a tad airheaded or oblivious most of the time, but he manages to remain endearingly good-hearted.
• Anti-Climax Boss: After defeating Robo-Gadget and using the iconic Gadget Copter to fly to Scolex's headquarters, Gadget's battle with Claw... isn't. Claw destroys the Copter with a missile and hooks Gadget on the rung of his helicopter, Gadget uses an Improvised Weapon made from a pen to trigger Claw's claw to shatter the control stick, and then everyone bails out of the helicopter and Claw lands in the GadgetMobile to be caged and trapped. Gadget's chase of two nameless prison escapees earlier in the movie is longer and has more action than his confrontation with his archnemesis.
• Ass Pull: Gadget's pen projectile trick that he uses to save Brenda and to disable Claw's helicopter. It comes out of absolutely nowhere and no explanation is given for whatever he did to make it work as he intended. That said, the refill of the pen hitting the Big Red Button on Scolex's claw, which crushes whatever he is holding, was actually foreshadowed, as he held Gadget's CPU in his claw and crushed it by pressing said button earlier in the film.
• Awesome Music:
  • John Debney's Big Budget Beef-Up version of the theme song.
  • "I'll be your everything/Fulfill your every dream..."
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The transitions between scenes which seem to showcase Gadget's various devices.
  • Gadget's various Imagine spots also are worthy of mention, usually of moments between him and Brenda that were seemingly cut from the main flow of the story.
  • The entire scene where Scolex, Gadget, and Kramer look directly into the camera to acknowledge the audience, after Scolex had accused "somebody of watching too many Saturday Morning cartoons". Fittingly enough, Sikes is completely baffled at what they're staring at.
  • Robo-Brenda's entire appearance. She only shows up in a couple of scenes where Brenda encounters her in Scolex's building, spouts some brief exposition about being cloned from the robotic foot stolen from Artemis Bradford, and then jumps off a rooftop and is never seen again (besides one of the mid-credits scenes).
• Broken Base: The fans are divided between those who despised the first film for not being close enough to the cartoons, those who hated the second film for not being enough like the first, people who hated both and prefer to stick to the cartoons, and the people who liked both films. All of the above is without taking onto consideration the people who liked either (or both) of the movies, but disliked the cartoons.
• Critic-Proof: It was poorly-reviewed by critics and Inspector Gadget fans alike, but still was a solid success at the box office.
• Ending Fatigue: Even after it's over, the end credits are littered with cutaway clips of what the characters have moved on to after catching Claw, complete with the Gadgetmobile's life story which carries on even when the credits finally conclude.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Fans prefer not to call Sanford Scolex Dr. Claw simply because his face is shown and that he acts more like a henchman of him.
• Ham and Cheese:
  • Matthew Broderick played both Gadget and Robo-Gadget. He is quite clearly enjoying one of these roles way too much. Guess which one.
  • Also Rupert Everett who wastes no giving everybody a yummy ham and cheese sandwich as the evil Claw.
• Ho Yay: That Kramer really seems to get off on Claw's abuse... while Claw praises Kramer in comparison to constantly dumping on Sikes. Not to mention:
  Claw: "Ok. Turn me on, Kramer..."
• Informed Wrongness: Chief Quimby. Gadget wants to be assigned to Artemis Bradford's murder investigation, and Quimby coldly tells him that the Bradford case demands real police work, and Gadget is not a real inspector or even a real police officer, he's just a publicity stunt that Quimby has to put up with. While definitely mean, Quimby is absolutely right — Gadget was only a security guard (and only for two years according to the opening scene) and has received no formal training as a police officer, so he has no business being put on a high-profile murder case.
• Moral Event Horizon: Scolex crosses it in his very first scene. Interestingly, John Brown (the future Gadget) thinks Scolex's MEH wasn't the murder of Dr. Artemus Bradford, but having his henchman track oil behind his limo, thus causing Brown's '87 Chevette to flip onto its roof and slide into a Yahoo! billboard. What makes that worse is that Scolex enjoys watching Brown suffer for going after him.
  John Brown: Now you've crossed the line! Pull over, you!
  Sanford Scolex: Stop the car, Sikes, I want to enjoy this.
• Never Live It Down: Despite its success at the box office, its unfaithfulness to the cartoon, its questionable casting, disjointed plot, overload of cartoon sound effects and the decision to reveal Dr. Claw's entire face have all remained huge sore points to fans of the bumbling Inspector Gadget. That's to say nothing of the equally baffling decision of reducing Penny to a side character, which many saw as completely missing the point of the cartoon.
• One-Scene Wonder: The film saves the iconic Gadget-Copter until the climax.
• Questionable Casting:
  • Of the directing variant, as David Kellogg was a commercial director whose only previous film effort was the critically panned Cool as Ice.
  • Practically the entire cast has been hit with this, with Rupert Everett and Matthew Broderick arguably being hit the hardest for their roles as Claw and Gadget, respectively. A less egregious case comes with Michelle Trachtenberg as Penny, who despite not being blonde at least attempts to make the most of the limited screentime she is afforded.
• The Scrappy:
  • Sanford Scolex isn't well liked for having his face completely revealed and that he is more appropriate for a henchman of Dr. Claw rather than Dr. Claw himself.
  • Matthew Broderick's Inspector Gadget isn't well-regarded by most fans, with his performance being singled out as one of the film's major weak points.
• Signature Song: "I'll Be Your Everything" by Youngstown.
• Special Effect Failure: The Gadgetmobile monitor in the film doesn't have a proper lip-sync. This was corrected in the sequel.
• Squick:
  • The giggly, acquiescent, relatively dim, programmed-to-be-a-cheerleader Robo-Brenda was basically a sex doll.
  • The entire plot hinges on the theft of a very life-like robotic foot. As in, it may as well be a disembodied real one.
• Tainted by the Preview: All of the marketing and trailers reveal Claw's face.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many diehard fans are clearly unhappy that Claw reveals his face throughout the film.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: You'd never know that Penny was the actual hero of the television series if you're going solely by this film, and she is noticeably absent throughout a lot of the action despite being a much more able detective than her uncle. This did not go unnoticed by fans and critics, which is perhaps why her role in the sequel is much more prominent.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: D.L. Hughley's performance as the voice of the Gadgetmobile caught people's attention and got to voice him in the sequel as well as have his performance serve as a rewrite to future iterations of the Gadgetmobile.
• Trailer Joke Decay: Several of the jokes from the film including deleted scenes are used in the trailers.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Say what you like about the film, but the creators really used their budget, and the whole thing is worth watching just for Stan Winston's realizations of Inspector Gadget's gadgets. Also, Claw's... claw, is pretty damn impressive looking.
• Woolseyism: As lame as Gadget's "You should've quit while you were ahead" pun is, its Polish translation, taking advantage of a well-known if somewhat rarely used phrase that can be roughly rendered as "Dreams of a severed head" (meaning aspirations expressed long past deadline), can be pretty funny.

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