Not sure it could have been good

Rating: 3/10 (29 August 2007)

As one of the "Loved It, 10 / 10" reviewers said, if you love Isaac Asimov's work, you probably won't like this film. He's right: I do and I didn't.
I must admit that the chase sequences were exciting, and the robots themselves (especially the facial features) quite compelling. Will Smith turns in a capable performance, given the script. But the story could have been so much more.
After dozens of robot stories, Asimov's three laws of robotics were a deeply ingrained paradigm of his "universe", and their inviolability was the framework on which many of his plots were built. The idea that there could be an overlying law that superseded them (as explored in the last of his "Robot novels") was meant to be a profound one.
This is hinted at in Dr. Calvin's disbelief, even ridicule, of the possibility that a robot had caused the death of Dr. Lanning, and Detective Spooner's superiors are similarly skeptical of his theory. But the average viewer of the movie would have no such bias. The three laws were mentioned only in passing, while Spooner's distrust of robots (although effectively explained later) was evident from the start. There's no reason for the audience to favor one over the other. There could be no surprise for the viewer when it was revealed how a robot had done the unthinkable, because for them there was no reason to believe it WAS unthinkable.
This might have been, like many of Asimov's stories, a taut little mystery disguised as a sci-fi yarn. Done correctly, it could have been a nice variation on the man-murdered-in-a-locked-room scenario, if the audience could be made to believe that the addition of a robot was irrelevant. As it is, there was no question to be resolved, just Spooner trying to stay alive long enough to make everyone else believe in Sonny's guilt. "Spooner thought all along a robot was guilty, and turns out he was right, well good for him." Along the way, some nice effects and car chases, but very little else.
I'm not sure it would have been possible to make this film in such a way that viewers unfamiliar with Asimov's work would appreciate it, yet be more true to the tone of his stories. It may be that there's just no way to instill in that audience (at least at first) a sense of mystery that should have accompanied the crime scene. Perhaps if Smith's character had also believed that a homicidal robot was impossible, and only reluctantly been brought to believe otherwise, the audience could have been surprised too.