Interesting premise badly executed

Rating: 5/10 (6 November 2016)

Well, first define intelligence. There are all kinds of intelligent life on earth that don't get recognition, so I'm not sure the robotic kind is anywhere near competing with the most basic existing intelligence, say bacteria: http://cosmicfingerprints.com/intelligent-bacteria/. All the trailer hoopla and name dropping with warnings about AI tried to build the premise about being on the brink of human extinction at the hands of AI, but the movie did not make a good case for it.
I wanted to like this movie, but it has a number of problems working against it for suspending disbelief, including the inventor of the greatest search engine and AI ever (watch out Google) who lives as a recluse on his property in the woods that is the size of a small country, a teenage looking boy-next-door employee chosen to test out the company's premier product and sexy robots whose hardware we get to see.
The bad guy genius doesn't really come across like a bad guy or a genius, more like an amiable, alcoholic frat buddy who hasn't quite thought through basic security. The protagonist is hard to root for given he falls in love with a plastic/light-up robot a few minutes after meeting "her" and then spends the rest of the movie trying to save her like a knight in shining armor. And then there's the girl robot who doesn't really come across as a robot, but as a girl trying to act like a robot.
The story takes a hopeful turn when there is a possibility that almost everyone is a robot, but that hope is dashed quickly. There are attempts at reaching some philosophical heights with references to Jackson Pollack's painting style and the Bhagavad Gita, but those really go nowhere. The parallel that humans are just programmed beings was probably the most powerful insight of the film, but it never gets fleshed out.
The end felt unnecessary, farcical and manipulative and appears to want the viewer to interpret it as the machines have taken over. This is pretty absurd given that the lab for creating them has been abandoned and the one person who could make another one is not able to.
The movie does build suspense well and has some interesting twists, but with all the suspense and twists it works to build to a crescendo that never appears and instead is replaced with a forced and contrived ending that really didn't make any profound statement about artificial intelligence at all.