Product: I, Robot [Region 2] (2004)
Rating: 3.0
Nice special effects, somewhat implausible plot
I was inherently suspicious of this film, having heard that only about five percent of it had anything whatever to do with Asimov's novel. Taking it on its own terms, though, it's really not a bad hour and fifty minutes of escapism. Will Smith plays Detective Spooner, a man with a bias against robots generally, even though he turns out to be partly bionic himself. The principal architect of the positronic robot revolution -- there's one for every five humans, now -- has apparently committed suicide but Spooner becomes convinced he was killed by one of the new generation of robots U.S.R. is about to release on the market. Asimov's Three Laws don't allow that, but (of course), a way has been found around that little problem. Aside from the fact that the laws even of Newtonian physics are ignored, and that Spooner's weapons seem to hold many thousands of bullets, the gymnastics of the big climatic scene are no more implausible than those in Star Wars. Nice CGI, too.