On February 22, the official premiere of the sci-fi rom-com Robots starring Jack Whitehall and Shailene Woodley took place in Ukrainian cinemas. The plot of the film is based on the short story The Robot Who Looked Like Me by Robert Sheckley, which was included in the collection of the same name published in 1973. In this review, we explain how the film mixes love, death and robots and how interesting it is to watch.
Pluses:
a nice pair of characters; actors interact well in the frame; courage of local authors; some really good jokes; an interesting concept borrowed from the original story by Robert Sheckley
Minuses:
the banality of the plot as a romantic comedy; lazy realization, which is manifested in the fact that the comedy is not always funny, and the romantic component is very weak and does not evoke a viewer response; the overall low ambition of the project
«Robots»
Genre sci-fi romantic comedy
Directors Anthony Hynes, Kasper Christensen
Starring Jack Whitehall, Shailene Woodley, Paul Rust, Paul Jurewicz, Nick Rutherford
Premiere movie theaters
Year of issue 2023
Website IMDb
In 2032, the United States begins to use robots as handymen. But the handsome and wealthy Charles has found a better use for his illegal android double, C-2. While the quitter spends his days playing first-person shooters, his mechanical copy not only goes to work and does laundry, but also meets girls, some of whom think that movies with Adam Sandler is a classic movie. After a series of dates, when it comes to the final base, our frantic lover hero comes into play.
One day, while searching for his next victim, C-2 comes across the stunning beauty Elaine. The android works according to the usual scheme, and the day is approaching when the girl invites Charles to her home. However, due to an unfortunate mistake, the boy’s robot double gets to the party instead of him, and the next day it turns out that he has disappeared. To find out what happened, the hero meets with Elaine and learns that she is using her double to achieve her own selfish goals. Now the unfortunate liars are forced to join forces to find their copies who are stealing their lives.
The film is arriving in Ukrainian theaters with a huge delay: its world premiere took place in May last year. Moreover, February 22 seems to be a strange date for the release of a rom-com, given that Valentine’s Day was a week earlier. But we have what we have.
Already in the opening scene, the film’s directors and screenwriters, co-writer of Borat Anthony Hines and Kasper Christensen, deliver a witty satire of Donald Trump’s immigration policy and throw a pebble in Elon Musk’s garden. But after that, the satirical fervor abruptly fades away. Obviously, the creators did not set themselves ambitious goals to ridicule a political, technological, or any other important aspect. Their main task was to entertain and make the viewer laugh, and they succeeded in this task about 50/50.
What Hines and Christensen cannot be accused of is a lack of courage. After all, to make a film in 2023 with two white heroes (at all four, it turns out), where there is no place for even minor characters representing LGBT, where a man treats women like garbage and a woman turns out to be just a mercantile bitch, this is not a progressive fat-free rom-com from some Netflix.
In this context, Robots seems to have been filmed somewhere in the noughties, and then for some unknown reason was shelved until it was accidentally found and released. It’s a shame that this time capsule factor can’t significantly affect the weak script and its frankly lazy implementation.
The film also contains a lot of jokes on the verge of foul play, which is also quite rare in contemporary romantic comedies because the days of projects like Good Luck Chuck! (2007) with its nudity and politically incorrect humor are long gone. Some gags are offensive, while others leave you indifferent. There’s a scene where a robot shaves its owner’s private area, and that’s so-so kind of humorous, but there’s an episode where an uncontrollable sexual android tries to spank Charles’s ass, and it really brings a smile to your face.
Jack Whitehall and the star of the teenage dystopia Divergent Shailene Woodley interact well on screen, but the script does not allow them to fully express themselves in both comedic and romantic terms. Closer to the finale, the actress will appear in a bold erotic image of a pseudo-high school girl — in high heels, a t-shirt, a miniskirt, stockings and two fiery tails. Fans of Shailene should definitely not miss it.
As for any borrowings from Robert Sheckley’s original story, they are minimal. Hines and Christensen allowed themselves to take only its plot, the names of the main characters, and that’s all. The motives of the characters and their behavior are fundamentally different from what was in the original source. And certainly no one was going to kill anyone there, unlike the two fools in the movie.
As a result, Robots looks quite bold for nowadays, but still a sterile romantic comedy with elements of road movie and science fiction, offering mostly flat humor and a weak love story.
The movie also reminds us once again of our dependence on gadgets, which you can always read on the ITC virtual pages. After all, just like about robots.