Ira Obot

Rating: 3/10 (5 November 2004)

SPOILERS
I can't remember very much from the collection of short stories that this book takes its title from, but I think they must have taken the detective story concept from Caves of Steel. The plotting has a similarly linear, haphazard feel to that book as well, so it's not really much of a disservice to Asimov. Anyway. This movie contains:
-Will Smith. He's a lame celebrity. He plays a lame cop, so it's not so bad watching him act like a chump this time around.
-Lego Robots. Actually they look pretty much like the droid army in that really dumb Star Wars movie from a few years back (the one with the little kid), only with more anthropomorphic features.
-A utopian robot prophesy.
-A misunderstanding between the senseless cop and robotkind about the evils of robot logic (the three laws) versus human selflessness. It gets resolved in the end, but it hardly matters because the only reason it's here in the first place is to "flesh out" Smith's character and give him an excuse to geek up all his encounters with robots by acting like a jerk. Like every other cog in this claptrap this part is completely cliché but innocuous enough.
-An Evil computer that wants to subjugate humans for our own good. This is the source of the twist at the end. It's not a very clever twist and it comes off as kind of irrelevant to the rest of the movie, but every movie needs to have one so there you go.
-Fight Scenes. One of the few things I remember about the movie is a little bit during the big action scene at the end where the camera tilts and rotates around Will Smith et al using the catwalk they are standing on as an axis. Sort of Matrixy but more three d. A good scene.
Things this movie does not contain:
-A fully realized analogy between the robots-cops relationship and then the race relations between the cops and everyone else. The main cops in this are played by African Americans and there's a seemingly-vestigial attempt to focus on the contradiction between robots as sentient beings and robots as property. The film makers never really go anywhere coherent with it so I'm left wondering at what stage this idea came into the movie and at what stage they dropped it.
Grade: 3/10. At least it's better than Paycheck.