At Medfield College, an nonintellectual named Dexter Riley (Kirk Cameron) becomes brilliant overnight. Following an electrical accident with a computer, he gains the abilities to remember any knowledge learned instantly and perfectly; all because the collective knowledge of the internet was transferred to his brain. Opportunistic Medfield College Dean, Al Valentine (Larry Miller), sees Dexter's new abilities as a way to win the intercollegiate College Knowledge Bowl and unseat long dominant Hale University. Dexter finds his new attention and responsibilities puts a strain on his relationships with his friends and girlfriend. Meanwhile Norwood Gils (Matthew McCurley) the 12 year old wunderkind genius responsible for Hale's academic dominance grows suspicious of Dexter's overnight success and threat to his position as number 1 and sets out to take Dexter Riley down.
Released in 1969, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes is best known for being Kurt Russell's first outing as a leading man and establishing the baseline for the majority of live-action feature films produced under Ron Miller's stewardship of the Walt Disney company throughout the 70s. I myself was rather mixed on the film enjoying Kurt Russell's charisma and some of the supporting cast such as Joe Flynn, but the movie itself basically felt like an extended version of popular gimmick sitcoms like I Dream of Jeanie or Betwitched, not bad mind you, but there's a reason most people's exposure to the film was as two part serialization on The Wonderful World of Disney. In the mid 90s Disney produced a series of TV movie remakes based on their properties including The Shaggy Dog, Escape to Witch Mountain, Freaky Friday, and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoe keeping the established frameworks and gimmicks of the original films while superficially updated elements to contemporary settings. While The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes wasn't that great of a movie to begin with, the 1995 remake recycles the idea to diminishing returns.
While Dexter Riley as a character wasn't all that memorable or engaging as a protagonist, it was more than made up for with Kurt Russell's natural likability and laid back charm that allowed him to shine even while playing a bare basics good natured simpleton. Kirk Cameron unfortunately plays the character in an updated fashion replacing the good natured simplicity with a more arrogant level of posing that doesn't make him nearly as strong of a protagonist (it basically comes off as a third rate Ferris Bueller). The character of Dexter Riley is still as anorexically thin as he was in the 1960s/70s and the only reason those movies worked (third film not withstanding) was because they banked off of Kurt Russell's strong presence, without a strong actor carrying the film the movie comes off as rather hollow and there's sort of an admission of this in the focus of the film as often times the movie will shift focus to its Supporting cast with the likes of Larry Miller and Dean Jones as competing deans, Dexter's friends who are expanded upon, and the replacement fill-in for A. J. Arno with McCurley's Norwood Gils. The supporting cast do fine I suppose, but the movie also feels greatly reduced in scale and scope (which it already was to begin with) as there's very little of the publicity seeking from the first film with Dexter Riley going around the media circuit and when they do go to larger scale venues such as a junket in Washington D. C. it feels very sparse and empty.
Most of the plot beats from the original film are touched upon, save for Dexter Riley's inadvertent stumbling upon A. J. Arno's criminal network which has been replaced with a subplot about a computer Hacker named "viper" who pulls immature pranks on the U. S. government like turning up the heat in the White House to 110 degrees or sending the 6th fleet to Daytona Beach (not that we see any of this) and this somehow leads Dexter Riley to being mistaken by the Government for being Viper, this could've been mined for comic friction in the same way the Arno character was (and possibly improved as I was never a fan of Arno as an antagonist) but the movie does surprisingly little with this update and aside from some polished up graphics showing Dexter's computerized brain (visualized through the color blue and lots of white lights with a computer GUI showing info retrieval) most of the gags could have easily been done in the 60s film and in fact were done in the 60s film. Anytime the movie flirts with trying something new such as a scene where Riley accesses the FBIs Most Wanted list and assists in an arrest or the subplot involving a hacker, it pulls itself back from it and anchors itself to the College Knowledge Bowl which was done in the first film and is done no differently here. Disney was more than capable of doing imaginative things with technology as shown with their 80s film Tron or even their low budget 1994 film Camp Nowhere that only pretended to have a high tech computer camp but used it for greater effect.
1995's The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes is competently made, but also hollow, predictable and pointless. The lack of a strong lead like the original's Kurt Russell is felt with Kirk Cameron's very blasé delivery that leaves virtually no impact, and while there are hints at more inventive usage of Dexter's computer brain all too often the movie sweeps these possibilities under the rug because it's anchoring itself to the 1960s framework of the original. If you need to experience Dexter Riley just watch the first two films in the original trilogy, they haven't aged gracefully, but they did do it first and better.
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