Honest-to-goodness, I think there are filmmaking lessons you can learn from literally any movie. Of course with many films, Kenneth Johnson’s 1988 film Short Circuit 2 included, the lessons are mostly in what not to do. First and foremost, this commercially unsuccessful follow-up to John Badham’s Short Circuit commits the cardinal sin of bad sequels: it tries to move forward without the original stars. With Steve Guttenberg missing in action, and Ally Sheedy contributing a one-sentence audio cameo, it falls to supporting actor Fisher Stevens to pick up the reins and assume centre stage.

That would be Jewish-American actor Fisher Stevens in brownface make-up as Indian computer engineer Ben Jabituya. The exaggerated voice and mannerisms were risible in the original film, and when pushed into the foreground became even more difficult to tolerate. Stevens is a talented actor, and has subsequently expressed regret at performing the role, but there is no hiding that the film is dominated by racist parody so egregious that anything else offered on-screen seems meaningless. It’s worse than having a figurative ‘elephant in the room’; the elephant is the room.

The screenplay by Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson feels perfunctory and unenthused. The previous film, which they also wrote, was about emerging artificial intelligence and the military-industrial complex. Here it is about foiling a bank robbery that just happens to be underway in the same building as Ben’s toy-making business. The seemingly random coincidences to justify giving self-aware robot Johnny Five a new adventure essentially make it the Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo of the 1980s. The plot, in a nutshell: after the events of Short Circuit Ben Jabituya (Stevens) has moved to New York to sell hand-made miniature replicas of Johnny Five. After teaming up with street hustler Fred Ritter (Michael McKean), and struggling to meet deadlines, Ben gets help from Johnny himself – delivered in a crate from Montana to build the toys in a derelict factory space. Unknown to any of them, the basement of the building is home to a pair of jewel thieves digging a tunnel to a bank vault across the street.

It all seems so arbitrary and dull. Michael McKean at least provides a few properly funny moments of comedy, but he’s palpably too talented for the material. As for Johnny Five, a little jive-talking robot goes a long way, and familiarity breeds contempt. There is also a strange imbalance in tone. Some scenes openly embrace child-friendly slapstick. Others, including a violent assault on Johnny Five, are unexpectedly brutal. It’s not clear who precisely the film is aimed towards, only that whoever the target was got missed.

Sequels this mad should have long since educated Hollywood to stop making them, but of course periodically one of them will unexpectedly succeed and send the industry back into making them again. Certainly this one appeared to stop one franchise in its tracks; there hasn’t been a sequel, reboot, or remake since.