436. Short Circuit (1986)

Starring: Ally Sheedy, Steve Guttenberg, Fisher Stevens

Director: John Badham

Running Time: 86 mins

Short Circuit is an American film about a robot that gains extra intelligence after a lightning strike, and escapes from a government lab, only to join forces with a young woman on his travels.

Well, this was a really irritating film. It may be the sort of fun, simple story that is ideal to keep children occupied for an hour and a half, but there’s not much past that. The main character was annoying, it was full of completely cheesy dialogue, and a storyline so difficult to follow that I grew tired of even listening at points.

There were some positives though. Throughout, there was the very occasional line that did offer the odd laugh, and some of the action and chaos caused by this insane robot was also good fun, but that wasn’t anywhere near enough to make up for the lack of true entertainment in this film.

Annoyingly, this film saw the return of one of my pet hates: naming characters by numbers. It’s the first time since 9 that this has happened, but it was such a grindingly excruciating little niggle in this film that made it all the more cringeworthy, and therefore unimpressive, to watch.

The other thing that annoyed me a lot about the main character, Number 5, was his attempted similarities to E.T. With the success of the merchandising of E.T. before this came out, you could see quite clearly what the makers of this film were trying to achieve. However, while E.T. is cool and cute, Number 5 was simply an irritating little machine, which I had no sympathies for, and his constant use of puns and references to try and get a wider audience involved was just the tip of the iceberg.

Overall, I’ll give this a 5.7, because although there were a few fun moments, it was on the whole an excruciatingly irritating film to sit through.