SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Lack of good storyline.

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Ben (Fisher Stevens) has been reduced to selling toy copies of Johnny Five on the street corners. Sandy Banatoni (Cynthia Gibb) is a associate from Simpson toy department who runs across one of the tiny Johnny Fives. She orders for more toys which Ben is incapable of making by himself. Hustler Fred Ritter (Michael McKean) insinuates himself into the deal. He borrows from a loan shark to rent out a rundown place across from a giant bank. Little do they know that diamond thieves are trying to break into the bank through their rundown place. The thieves try to run them out. Then Johnny Five arrives from Newton and Stephanie's Montana ranch to help Ben build his toys.It's a scaled-back sequel to the cute original. That explains the loss of the lead actors and relocate shooting to Toronto. Ally Sheedy only has a voice message. On the other hand, Fisher Stevens returns with the racially insensitive character. The movie is not only lower quality. It is more mean-spirited without the cute Newton and Stephanie romance. It's stupider. Johnny Five still has a bit of charm but the franchise is no longer fun.

The worst part about this movie is the repeat performance of Fisher Stevens as "Ben Jahveri". His fake accent is atrocious and his "hairy" facial makeup makes him look like an East Indian Wolfman. (He's not even of that nationality.) A real dumb storyline: Ben is a down and out computer genius selling miniature battery operated toys based on the Johnny Five design. He meets up with Fred Ritter (Michael McKean) and they devise a way to sell hundreds of them to Simpson's (Sears of Canada) as a Christmas toy. So, they send for Johnny to assemble them. It's supposed to take place in NYC, but it sure looks like Toronto, Canada to me. (Look for the Canadian-spelled signs) There are two major bad guys: 1.The loan shark's goons that keep breaking up the factory. 2.Oscar Baldwin (badly played by Jack Weston) who plots to break into his bank's vault to steal priceless diamonds. It's actually better than it sounds, as Johnny Five is the main character of the movie, and his giant "Muppet-Like" persona and actions are amazing. So many plot holes I could drive a double-decker bus through them: 1.The Army would certainly notice the robot is still alive and reclaim him. 2.An artificial lifeform would not quality for U.S. citizenship. 3.The background for the ceremony doesn't look American at all. Often "thrown in" as a double feature DVD along with the original "Short Circuit", which I like much better. Kids will watch it for the robot alone and not even notice how silly the whole thing is.

Only 4.8 / 10!? Wow, I simply have to stress this as it is such an underrated title here at IMDb. Sometimes you can be seriously misled by vote numbers.Short Circuit 2 was, at least for me, better then original in terms of script writing. Rare thing about sequels, but there it is. Story was more developed, complex, interesting and characters were more explored then in original movie. I liked SC1, but SC2 was more fun to watch. It has past 2 decades since it was released and yesterday I watched it for the first time in my life. It seems to me as it was not 20 years, but more like 100 years difference. Modern movies and TV shows are way colder, stripped down of any human emotions, love and poetic/romantic views on life, that makes you really wonder... have we progressed in a right direction for the past 2 decades? As cheesy as it seems, this title at least had a decent vocabulary (rarity this days) and addressed many complex things about life like love and understanding of human relationships.Animatronics, with all it's 'simplicity' and flaws in comparison to modern CGI, at least had something real (dare to say 'human touch'), that also adds to a whole effect it had left on me. Yes, today we have Transformers movies that look perfect, but one look at Johnny 5 and you can see what ingredient is missing... One thing is for sure, this kind of films are not made any more these days.8 out of 10

Short Circuit 2, for all its inherent '80s cheese, is a genuinely touching film. Through very well-worn staples of robots-with-emotions stories, it explores the nature of personality and what it really means to be alive. However, it avoids total redundancy by pairing Johnny Five, a brainy, kindly robot with retro pop culture references just popping out of his head, with Benjamin, a nerdy, overzealous soon-to-be citizen played with equal silliness and empathy by Fisher Stevens. Two scenes in particular truly stand out: one, when Johnny Five has been arrested, he sits chained to a wall contemplatively reading Pinocchio and Frankenstein. In another, after Five has been mercilessly beaten (as an adult, it still makes me cry), he meets up with Fred, played by Michael McKean. Too injured to speak and running on a stolen car battery, Johnny Five desperately (yet painfully slowly) scrawls his pleas for help on an alley wall with a rock. This film has many flaws from both technical and aesthetic viewpoints, but I still just can't divorce myself from how moving it is to watch a robot genuinely struggle to be alive in both a physical and metaphysical sense.