SHORT CIRCUIT (1986)

SHORT CIRCUIT (1986)

Tagline: Something wonderful has happened... Number Five is alive!

(Comedy, Sci-Fi, A Kinder Gentler Terminator) [PG]

Yes, I'd like to speak to one of your head warmongers, please.

In this one, a company that is creating AI super weapons when one of its robots designated Number 5, becomes self-aware after a lightning strike and begins to rewire itself to obtain more input. It doesn’t take long before the robot, runs into a kind woman named Stephanie Speck who befriends it believing Number 5 is an alien. Now the two must avoid Nova the company that owns Number 5 with the help of Number 5’s skeptical creator Dr. Newton Crosby and his colleague Ben. 

So the one big draw for me when it comes to this thing is the fact that we have a freaking robot just running around cracking jokes it learned watching network television. I guess I didn’t think the jokes would hold up, but I watched this recently and found myself cracking up a bit. The other draw is the cast. When this came out Steve Guttenberg (POLICE ACADEMY) was well known as a sort of unassuming “every man” who was hard not to like. He was in lots of fun comedies and this was one of them. The other major draw at the time was Ally Sheedy who was on this interesting career trajectory where she’d crush it in a fun movie like WAR GAMES, then did something less fun, but still great like BREAKFAST CLUB, then bam, straight into the nosedive of a lifetime into one of the worst movie ever made ST. ELMO’S FIRE. The bam, she jumps right into one of the best movies of her career with SHORT CIRCUIT. Of course, there were a few movies I’ve never seen in that string, but of her majors, that is pretty much how it went down. We also get a heavy dose of Fisher Stevens (MY SCIENCE PROJECT). Apparently, a bunch of people thought he was really from India because he played this role so well. He even spent time in India to get the accent down for this role. These days I guess playing people from other nationalities isn’t allowed anymore, but the United States seems to be the only country that even cares. This means some people are actually projecting pain onto other races that they might not even feel or care about. It’s pretty janky. 

The pacing of this movie is near perfect. It doesn’t take long before the story jumps in head first and we get to see Number 5 doing Number 5 things. I think as an adult I see the messes he makes and I kind of think “someone needs to clean that crap”. However, as a kid, I thought those parts were the funniest thing ever. This film definitely has a direct line to my nostalgia mindset and to be honest, I just kind of floated past this thing after seeing it on streaming services for about a year. I really don’t have a good reason for that, but I am really glad I revisited it because this is just a really fun movie and even the bad guys are pretty fun. G.W. Bailey (MANNEQUIN) plays Skroeder to perfection. He’s kind of the military guy that works for Nova. Then we have Austin Pendleton who plays the main guy at Nova Howard Marner. He is best known for MY COUSIN VINNY, but he strikes the perfect balance of serious, but incompetent in this thing that makes it all work with the rest of the movie's tone quite nicely. 

For an 80’s movie, the use of practical effects is near flawless and this thing tops nearly every other CGI-loaded robot movie made in the way of believability. That is because they used over a million dollars of the budget to give us an actual robot. I am not saying there are not cooler movies out there, but this film did everything it set out to do. Number 5 feels like he comes to life and the storyline is heartwarming and well-written all around. 

Overall I have to give this one a solid 6 out of 7. It’s one of the better 80s flicks that doesn’t seem to get quite the amount of love that some of the other bigger 80s movies got. 

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