Knight Rider 2000
Dir: Alan J. Levi
1991
*
Knight Rider 2000 was a bold and rather bizarre attempt at rebooting a much loved series that should have probably been left alone. It is essentially a feature length pilot for a TV series that never happened, unsurprisingly really, as it is one of the saddest things I witnessed in my youth. I was a huge Knight Rider fan, so when I learnt of its return and radical new direction I was thrilled. Knight Rider 2000 sees the characters of the TV series jump fourteen years into the future from where we last saw them in 1986. Knight Industries has merged with the Foundation for Law and Government and become The Knight Foundation. In this version of the future, all handguns are illegal and convicts are frozen rather than jailed, leaving them to sleep off their sentences rather than do hard time. When one said convict is released/thawed, he promptly shoots the Major, not having the time to reflect on his previous wrong-doing. So with a murdered on the lose, the only obvious solution is to build a car that will catch him. The Knight Foundation, led by Devon Miles (Edward Mulhare returning to his role in the TV series), designs and builds the Knight 4000 and entices Michael Knight to return to the driving seat. The Knight 4000 is a bright red Pontiac Banshee prototype that we're told can travel on water but sinks the first scene it is attempted in. We learn fairly early on that the black Trans-Am from the TV series has been scrapped and is not seen in the entirety of the film. This is where my interest started to wane. Michael Knight manages to piece together bits of KITT's AI unit, so thankfully we had the voice (once again voiced by William Daniels) but he spends most of the film on the dashboard of a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air. It's fair to say at this juncture that this wasn't quite the Knight Rider we had all fallen in love with. Things go from strange to down right puzzling as the Hoff then has to track down the last component of KITT, a microchip, and finds it has been placed in the brain of a Police officer who was at the scene of the murder they are investigating. By 'touching' KITT, the said police officer and the car become one and somehow remember each other's memories. Devon Miles then get killed off, angering me greatly, and in what has to be one of the strangest scenes of all time, KITT accidentally microwaves Star Trek's James Doohan who plays himself in the film. Utter sacrilege and a blip in quality that is best left forgotten.