Circuitry Man II

Faced with death, android Banner, aka Circuitry Man (Jim Metzler), accepts an offer from FBI agent Kyle (Deborah Shelton). He is to travel with her to Brazil to deactivate the vicious Plughead (Vernon Wells). Meanwhile, imbecilic prisoner Rock (Nicholas Worth) and his comrade Leech (Dennis Christopher) engineer a jailbreak and abscond with some microchips that Plughead wants. While two futuristic Keystone Kops, Squid (Paul Willson) and Beany (Andy Goldberg), pursue the fugitives, Banner and Kyle are delayed by a teleportation foul-up that dumps them fifty miles short of their destination. At the same time, Plughead, who has given infertile scientist Norma (Traci Lords) her own synthetic child, collects on the deal by forcing her to join him in plugging into the pain of a dying man. While Leech and Rock head for Plughead's lab, Kyle and Banner battle their way across the countryside. They find themselves up against armed energy terrorists who, fortunately, have a mutual interest in pulling the plug on Plughead. On horses borrowed from the extremists, Kyle and Banner ride to their destination. In addition to selling longevity chips to the super-rich, enterprising Plughead plots to retrieve information he stored in Banner's brain years ago. Kyle betrays Banner, who's holding her mother, Norma, prisoner, and after Plughead invades Banner's mind to locate "the Sequence" which will give him supreme mind control of the human race, he also starts sapping Kyle's life force. With Norma's assistance, Banner jacks himself into the dying Kyle (also an android), sneaks into Plughead's consciousness, and pulls Plughead back into his own Circuitry Man mind. With Plughead trapped inside Banner's being, the force of Banner's love for Kyle demolishes the fiend.

Unlike its clever 1989 predecessor, CIRCUITRY MAN II invents itself as it goes along, with no apparent concern about whether its picaresque adventures add up to a cohesive whole. Events pile on top of each other to form a tedious whole, whose computer-game affectations lend it neither purpose nor texture. The futuristic happenstance is interrupted by unusually intrusive--and unfunny--"comic" relief in the form of Rock and Leech, who screech and drool like Marat/Sade inmates lost in space. And what are those goofball coppers Squid and Beaney even doing in this film? Despite some formidable hardware and the exciting inner-cranial combat climax, CIRCUITRY MAN II would be unbearable were it not for the fancy romantic footwork of leads Shelton and Metzler. Though playing cyborgs, their star chemistry gives them recognizable human dimensions that are in short supply in this chaotic movie. (Graphic violence, extreme profanity, extensive nudity, substance abuse.) leave a comment