ROBOTS (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Robots, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 19, 2023

It's not just that Robots isn't funny. It's unfunny in a sort of way that's either unfortunate or, on occasion, aggressive.

The foundation of the story, coming from the 1973 short story "The Robot Who Looked Like Me" by Robert Sheckley, is at least broadly amusing. One has to look past the specifics of the actual setup of Ant Hines and Casper Christensen's screenplay to find that spark of humor here, though, because the details start to feel like an increasing series of miscalculations.

It's set in 2032, when a border fence between New Mexico and Mexico has been completed in a scene that suggests an inexact political satire—which is appropriate, since so much of the movie, political or not, is so vague or already outdated, as one will note from the assorted pop culture references that were probably quite topical at the time of filming. If anything, Hines and Christensen's shared feature directorial debut could serve as a good lesson to filmmakers to keep such jokes limited or ensure that they possess a bit more staying power than an in-the-moment cryptocurrency or the notion of one particular rapper achieving the second-highest office in the country. Things change quickly after all and especially in these times.

Ironically, that's the basic premise of this story in a way. The more important piece of information gleaned from that opening is that undocumented immigration has become a thing of the past, and replacing migrant workers in this near-future economy is a new line of robots (built by a company owned by a man who has, apparently after the movie finished post-production, had some, to be generous, business issues or, to be less generous and more literal, disasters—again serving as a reminder about more long-term thinking when it comes to both world-building and joke-making).

The somewhat funny idea is that Charles (Jack Whitehall), a very good slacker, has obtained an illegal robot double of himself to do all of the irritating routines of life. Mainly, that means the robot C-2 goes to work for Charles, but far less sympathetically, it also means that Charles instructs his android double to be the perfect gentleman on dates with assorted women whom the real Charles finds at a local ice rink.

The goal is for the robot to woo these unsuspecting women to the point that they want to have sex with him, and once a date for that is set, Charles swoops in to take the robot's place, leading us to wonder about the exact terminology of the moral and legal crimes this guy is repeatedly committing. Whitehall can be a charming actor and comedian, but such qualities have their limits. The actor has the unenviable, doomed task of having to struggle against those limits from his character's first introduction.

There's a similar quality to Charles' eventual and unlikely partner over the course of this tale. She's Elaine (Shailene Woodley), who's doing a con that's slightly similar to Charles' own. She's wooing well-to-do men to obtain money and gifts to pawn for cash, but when it's time to have sex with these men, Elaine enlists the help of her own robot double E-2. One could argue, as Elaine does at one point, that she's a less-contemptible fraudster than Charles, but is there really a point of debating which of two unlikeable characters is the worse one?

Through a miscommunication, the two robots end up having sex, falling in love, and running off together. When Charles and Elaine discover what has happened, they pursue their doubles, hoping to bring things back to normal.

The rest of this plot probably doesn't need to be explained. Even so, the gradual bonding between our two leads—the human versions, obviously—is particularly unconvincing on account of how drastically their hatred for each other shifts, simply by way of a road trip, a night in a cabin in the woods, and going on the run from the law after their doubles seem to commit a mass shooting in order to get them out of the picture. That's a jarring moment of such extreme tonal dissonance that it barely matters how that development turns out here. It's almost more distasteful that Hines and Christensen turn the notion into an "innocent" joke.

Some of the turns here are theoretically clever (The robots have much better lives than their human counterparts), but Robots doesn't seem to recognize their possibilities. Instead, the movie is mostly defined by its lack of insight, foresight, and any ability to see how poorly imagined and executed the attempted humor here is.

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