It seems fitting that Will Smith's new sci-fi thriller I, Robot feels as if it had been written by a computer because it's a cautionary tale about the danger of relying too much on machines.
Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman's story looks at a near-future where robots begin developing minds of their own.
Their first mission is to reverse roles with their former masters, so robots will be in charge and humans will do their bidding.
This sounds suspiciously like the plan those simians had in Planet of the Apes and it's just the first of numerous vintage flicks this one looks to for inspiration.
You can accuse Vintar and Goldsman's screenplay of many things but originality is not one of them.
It's up to police officer Del Spooner (Smith) to convince an unsuspecting and oblivious society of the imminent transfer of power.
Spooner is a bit like Tom Cruise's lawman in Minority Report and a lot like every rogue movie detective who has his badge taken away for being too zealous and too right.
He's a futuristic Dirty Harry and he takes his fury out on one particular robot named Sonny (voiced by Alan Tudyk), whom Spooner is convinced has murdered its creator, the renowned Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell).
In a twist borrowed from Total Recall, Lanning is as much Spooner's Dr. Frankenstein as he is Sonny's.
Lanning calls Spooner from beyond the grave, setting the investigation into motion.
Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood) is annoyed that Spooner is poking around U.S. Robotics on the eve of the
distribution of the latest and largest upgrade in robots. There soon will be one robot for every five humans.
Greenwood knows he's playing a one-dimensional villain, so he pulls out all the stops, glowering and gritting his teeth to punctuate every line of dialogue.
Robertson assigns an uptight scientist, Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan), to be Spooner's liaison.
Spooner says she is the dumbest smart person he's ever met and she counters he's the dumbest dumb person she's ever met, so we know they are attracted to each other and that she'll literally let her hair down the moment she realizes he may be onto something ominous.
The character relationships are as silly and obvious as the tired plot, but that's not the biggest problem with I, Robot.
Those robots are anything but scary.
When they attack in packs they look like bugs or gremlins.
Poor Smith tries desperately to look as if he is battling menacing creatures and in three soul-searching scenes he revs up the pathos quotient as if he's angling for another Oscar nomination.
I, Robot borrows its title from Isaac Asimov's short stories but it was actually written by Vintar as a spec script called Hardwired.
To Vintar and Goldsman's credit, when they decided to pay homage to much better sci-fi films, they went to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the granddaddy of them all, for the film's biggest plot twist.
Alex Proyas, who directed The Crow and Dark City, tempers the computerized action sequences with plenty of Smith's characteristic humour and, best of all, he keeps the flick's running time under two hours.
This means he has to discard the back stories for characters like Spooner's grandmother and a young street kid, but the film moves at a good clip.
Proyas claims that I, Robot pushes the computer-graphics effects envelope.
If that really is the case, it does so at the expense of such concepts as plot, character and theme.
His film may be slick, but it's as cold and dehumanized as a robot.
(This film is rated PG)
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