Robots
Smart dialogue and Jack Whitehall fail to enliven a feeble sci-fi farce.
Dei ex machina: Shailene Woodley, Shailene Woodley and Jack Whitehall. Image courtesy of Amazon
It’s sad really. Jack Whitehall is a really funny guy and it’s easy to see how the premise of Robots appealed to him. Whitehall gets to play two characters for the price of one: a cruel, spoiled incompetent as well as his sweet, selfless lookalike manservant. This being 2032, the world of humanoid automation has leaped forwards, with lifelike robots taking the place of illegal Mexicans. The Trump Wall has finally been completed and all Mexican immigrants banished, allowing the white populace to sleep easy in their beds knowing that the automatons (mass-produced by Tesla) are guaranteed neither to rob nor rape decent Americans.
We then cut to Belen, New Mexico, where we find the charming but rather hopeless Charles Cameron (Whitehall) attracting gullible young women like bees to a honeytrap. But this Charles is actually an android, doing all the hard work of dating so that his rich, lazy owner (Whitehall) can stroll across the threshold and take the sex from there. Of course, we all know that AI is going to prove more than the sum of its parts and complications duly ensue when Charles meets his match in Elaine (Shailene Woodley), a young woman as unscrupulous as he…
All this sounds terribly promising on paper, but without star chemistry the best ideas can fizzle in the edit and there is no comic spark between Whitehall and Woodley. He perpetuates his image as the naughty English roué and he does cup a handful of deep chuckles. With two Jack Whitehalls on screen at the same time, one is unlikely to forget the image of the actor shaving his own perineum. More problematic is Woodley (who replaced Emma Roberts) and she doesn’t appear to have her heart in it.
As it is, the film is predictable and rather ineffectual and so desperately wants to be a comedy that it short circuits itself at the first hurdle. Robots would actually have been much funnier had it been designed as a thriller. The incessant score by Magnus Fiennes (brother of Ralph and Joseph) tries hard to remind us not to take the events on screen too seriously, leaving a lot of shouting and the breaking of household objects to provide the visual farce. First-time directors Ant Hines and Casper Christensen brandish their inexperience with obvious set-ups visible a mile off. There’s the occasional decent one-liner and a liberal use of ripe language, while the consistent mispronunciation of the word facsimile as “faxy-mile” raises a smile. But the inherent darkness beneath the sitcommy approach would have been more shocking and funnier if an ounce of realism had been realised. Which is a shame as Whitehall really does give it his all.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Shailene Woodley, Jack Whitehall, Shailene Woodley, Jack Whitehall, Nick Rutherford, Emanuela Postacchini, Paul Rust, Paul Jurewicz, David Grant Wright, Chelsea Edmundson, Jackamoe Buzzell, Samantha Ashley, Richard Lippert, Hank Rogerson, Kate Herman.
Dir Ant Hines and Casper Christensen, Pro Bernd Wintersperger, Sascha Krnajac, Lars Sylvest, Thorsten Schumacher, Stephen Hamel, Julian Favre and Cassian Elwes, Screenplay Ant Hines and Casper Christensen, from the short story ‘The Robot Who Looked Like Me’ by Robert Sheckley, Ph Luke Geissbühler, Pro Des Travis Zariwny, Ed Matthew Freund, Music Magnus Fiennes, Costumes Lisa Norcia, Sound Kendall Barron.
Robots Filmproduktion GmbH & Co. KG/Company Films/Road Film/Rocket Science/Elevated Films-Amazon Media.
93 mins. USA. 2023. US Rel: 19 May 2023. UK Rel: 7 July 2023. Available on Prime Video. Cert. 15.
