Starring: Matthew Broderick, Michelle Trachtenberg, Steve Carell, and Rupert Everett
The Obsolete Operating System
Wowsers! The world’s most famously bumbling bionic detective is called out of a forced retirement in Inspector Gadget 3: System Upgrade. In the decades since his last great adventure, John Brown (Matthew Broderick) has tried to live a quiet life, but the fast-paced evolution of technology has left him feeling profoundly irrelevant. He now lives in a world dominated by sleek, efficient AI policing, self-healing architecture, and nanotech enforcers—feeling like an old VCR in a streaming world, constantly glitchy, rusty, and painfully obsolete. His internal systems are often auto-correcting to the wrong tools, and his warranty has definitely expired.
However, the world’s reliance on seamless connectivity proves to be its greatest weakness when the brilliant and terrifying villain, Dr. Claw (Rupert Everett), returns from the shadows. Claw unveils his most ambitious and modern scheme yet: hijacking the global, interconnected “Smart City” network. His goal is to instantly weaponize every smart appliance—turning self-driving cars into kamikazes, toasters into explosive devices, and automated drones into deadly assassins.
The Unhackable Human Error
When Claw initiates his attack, the pristine, sophisticated new generation of police bots and automated security systems are instantly compromised and turned into Claw’s army. Panic grips the metropolis. The authorities quickly realize that only one operating system is chaotic, old, and fundamentally analog enough to be completely impervious to Dr. Claw’s digital takeover: Inspector Gadget’s own wonderfully glitchy, unpredictable bionic suit.
Penny (Michelle Trachtenberg) returns, no longer a young sidekick but the brilliant, highly stressed head of the city’s Cyber-Security Division. Recognizing her uncle as the city’s last line of defense, she must remotely guide him through a sequence of increasingly disastrous and improbable missions.
Adding to the chaos is the introduction of a new, grumpy robotic dog handler, Commander Robo-Dog (Steve Carell), an advanced, cynical bot forced to partner with the Inspector due to budget cuts. Gadget must dust off his helicopter hat, oil his extendable arms, and prove that despite the efficiency of AI, sometimes you need a little human (or half-human) error, chaotic ingenuity, and classic bumbling to save the modern world.