I haven’t seen the second Short Circuit film anywhere near as much as the first. This was only my third time of watching it.
It’s a really different animal from the first one. Only two characters from the original movie reappear - Johnny 5 the robot himself, and Ben, played by Fisher Stevens. No Ally Sheedy or Steve Guttenberg - well, Ally Sheedy did a brief voice spot, when Johnny 5 read her character’s letter to Ben. But she took no part in the main events of the movie.
Johnny 5 - or “Number Johnny 5” as Ben kept calling him - was his usual self, eager for input. The thought of the big city is always exciting at first, but like so many others before him, he quickly learned that most people don’t give a damn. We’ve all felt like he does here.
He speed-reads a large number of books - I love how he says he could read every book in the shop in 35 minutes. The most notable bit is earlier though with “The Hound Of The Baskervilles”, where halfway through reading it he announces, “I think the chauffeur did it!” - and then when he’d finished, says, “he did!” - for the record, there is no chauffeur in that book, so I guess they must have wanted the title for its familiarity but didn’t want to actually give away who the real killer was, so they invented a chauffeur for this purpose. It’s very poignant that the two books he deemed worthy of extra study were revealed to be “Pinocchio” and “Frankenstein” - to illustrate how he senses the majority of people perceive him.
The “outsider” theme is just one of many interesting ideas in this film. Another is the fact that for all his super-intelligence, Johnny 5 doesn’t understand deception. I’m tempted to question the validity of this blind spot, given that he used deception tactics on a couple of occasions in the first film - throwing the homing beacon into a passing truck, and making a duplicate of himself for the military to destroy.
One thing that I do find questionable though is this. In this second film Ben is studying to become a US citizen. That meant he was not a US citizen in the first film, when working on the original SAINT project, highly top-secret and very sensitive. Would the US government really allow a foreign national access to such a powerful weapon? It’s not even as if this detail has any importance in the storyline.
Oh well . . . back to the positives. The music clues on the telephone answering machine is a really fun sequence, as Sandy and the cab driver work out what the songs are and where to go next with each clue. Having said that, if Ben can do such clever things as that, it makes you wonder how he fell on such hard times in the first place to be reduced to selling Johnny 5 toys on the streets of New York City.
So this movie has some holes in the plot, but it packs quite an emotional punch, in some ways a bigger emotional punch than the first movie (apart from the end where we thought he’d been destroyed of course!). While the first movie straddles the comedy and drama of it, the second really focuses on the feelings of isolation, and has the gags around the side of that. Also when we see Johnny 5 take the beating he gets from the robbers, it’s heartbreaking.
Overall, in terms of blending together the drama and comedy, it’s not quite as good as the first, but it’s growing on me.
