Worth a look *** out of ****

Rating: 7/10 (18 July 2004)

With the summer thrills at the theater slowly winding down, I Robot is certainly not the most refreshing sci-fi I've seen lately (like Minority Report) but it does succeed on a lot of levels.
Will Smith is Del Spooner, a dedicated police officer who's assignments are homicide. Del is likable, smart and caring, unlike the idiot police officer he played in the horrible Bad Boys and the even dumber sequel.
The year is 2035 and robots are the key to the nations economy. Virtually all tasks large and small are done with robots with three rules that cannot be broken.
1.A robot must not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to be harmed.
2.A robot must obey orders givin it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
3.A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.
For reasons unknown, (well for the first 45 minutes) Spooner is the only one that doesn't trust them. (A clue is given at the very beginning but is not revealed until later.) When called to the scene of an apparent suicide by the creator of robots, (Dr. Alfred Lanning) Del is unsurprisingly convinced that it may be murder by the head robot Sonny. Though Smith is given top billing, Sonny pulls a Tommy Lee Jones (his character Gerard in The Fugitive) and slyly steals the rest of the show.
The action rarely lets up and really gets going within the last 30 minutes and especially when the robots go completely beserk (caused by the one you don't expect) and director Alex Proyas who gave us The Crow and the vastly underrated Dark City has done a decent job of giving us what Steven Spielberg brilliantly did in Minority Report; good characters, good effects and the story, convincing.
P.S. I'm sorry Mr. Roger Ebert but 52 million just proved you were wrong again. (see his review of this film and Scooby Doo)