Another film that simply re-uses a title from a previous, better, film (although maybe I am the only person to think back fondly on the animated feature with the same name), Robots is a standard comedy with a sci-if twist. More problematic, it’s a film with a lead role for Jack Whitehall, who rarely works as well in movies as he does in his comedy gigs.
Set slightly in the future, our world now has numerous robots available to take over various jobs (e.g. cleaning, hospitality service, refuse collection, etc). It’s illegal to use one as a stand-in for yourself though. That illegality doesn’t dissuade Cameron (Whitehall), a selfish and lazy young man who uses his robot double to meet and charm women, taking over when it’s time to “seal the deal”. It also doesn’t dissuade Elaine (Shailene Woodley), a young woman who uses her robot double when the men she convinces to buy her lots of treats figure that it is time for them to get jiggy with it. Elaine and Cameron eventually cross paths, in robot/human form, and a standard mix-up eventually leads to both robots falling in love with one another and running away. That puts both our main characters in quite a predicament, which forces them to work together in order to fix the whole situation.
Based on a short story, “The Robot Who Looked Like Me”, by Robert Sheckley, this is co-written by co-directors Casper Christensen and Anthony Hines, two men with separate backgrounds in transgressive performance comedy (one having worked on Klovn/Klown on TV and film, the other having worked with Sacha Baron Cohen numerous times), but you wouldn’t know that from the end result. All you get here is familiar and tiresomely lazy plotting, a wildly varying selection of gags, and no one memorable moment to think back on and smile about after it’s all over.
Whitehall and Woodley actually don’t do a terrible job, and certainly work better together than they do apart, but neither feels good enough to actually carry the film. That wouldn’t be so bad if there was a fun supporting cast to help, but there isn’t. Paul Rust is moderately amusing as the robot creator, roped in to help Cameron and Elaine recover their property, and David Grant Wright is fine as a father concerned about the erratic behaviour of his son, but neither performer can do enough to make up for what is essentially a double-dose of Whitehall. And things aren’t helped by Paul Jurewicz in the role of Ashley, a man who prefers to be called Fat Ninja. While I am not laying the blame for the annoyance of the character entirely with Jurewicz, he is an unwelcome addition to the core cast.
If you don’t mind the opening act, where a few of the better jokes are placed, then you should find enough here to enjoy. It has a standard runtime of just over 90 minutes, which is a plus, and certainly doesn’t attempt to overtax the brain. It just doesn’t ever feel like a proper movie, but more like a slick pilot for an anthology show based around the central idea. And as for the horribly convenient ending, where everyone gets exactly the final moments that you expect them to get . . . it makes you want to turn the whole thing off, dismantle it, and ditch the parts in some nearby scrapyard. In fact, the third act is bad enough to cause me to lower my rating one whole point. Others may be a bit more generous.
3/10
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