Product: I, Robot [Region 2] (2004)
Rating: 2.0
I, Cliche
When you want to see what's wrong with the vast number of big budget action movies, you needn't go much further than I, Robot. Based extremely loosely on the book of short stories by Isaac Asimov, this film is a crude assembly of action-movie cliches that somehow make an entire film.In a near-future Chicago, robots are commonplace and something of a servant class, bound by the Three Laws of Robotics, which prohibits harm of humans and compels obedience. When a robot apparently commits murder, the cop who investigates the crime finds something much more threatening afoot than a single homicide.Executed well, this could have been a decent movie, but no one involved seems that interested in any real level of originality. The writing is loaded with cliches, most prominently with Will Smith's cop character, a sullen but wise-cracking detective who has a deep dislike for robots. You've seen the same character in a dozen other movies, as well as the wise-and-feisty grandmother, the hard-nosed police captain, the sinisterly pragmatic CEO and the idealistic-and-nave scientist. The action sequences are also often comically stale, with slow-mo, Matrix-like effects that more intrusive than effective.Unfortunately, the movie does have some good stuff; I say "unfortunately" because if it was completely bad, it would be more likely that this sort of movie would be rejected by audiences and we'd stop seeing these relatively tedious flicks. But the special effects with the robots are often interesting and the story does become a bit more watchable in the last act. So, although this movie is unoriginal and generally lacking, it has just enough good stuff to merit two stars.