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Chad
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Posted: August 10, 2004 at 12:00am
Del Spooner is a homicide detective that lives in the year 2035, where nearly everyone has their own robot to take care of things for them. Del is the exception, and hates the idea of so many robots running about and is uneasy with living around them. It's pretty ironic then, that his next assignment is to investigate the suicide of Dr. Alfred Lansing, the creator of the artificially-intelligent robot. As he's looking into things with the aid of Dr. Susan Calvin, he finds a robot named Sonny in Lansing's office which attacks him. Since the first law of robots is to not attack humans, everyone finds this a bit strange, but Lawrence Robertson, the owner of the company, brushes it off as the robot being a defective model. Del is a bit more suspicious, however, and digs deeper into the cause of Lansing's death and what it all means.
I'm not going to get into how well this film compares to the works of Isaac Asimov, as this really wasn't based on that at all. It shared the same title and had some similarities, but basically this was a completely different story. So with that in mind, this review will focus only on the movie itself, and not how it matched up to the Asimov original.
The storyline found here is pretty interesting for the most part, though very predictable. There's one or two actual shockers thrown in around the end, but for the most part you'll see each twist and surprise coming a few scenes in advance. I also didn't find it too thrilling that the robots, during the fighting scenes, suffered from the Kung-Fu syndrome; that being that there's hundreds of robots trying to kill someone, but they only attack one at a time so as not to be unfair to the person that they're attacking. Sure, it wouldn't have made for much of a movie had the main characters been killed off in first half hour, but things could have been slightly more intelligent in that respect. Otherwise, the story flows along nicely, mixing in the right amount of story-to-action sequences and keeping things interesting along the way. With the exception of the final scene, which had some great camera-work and ideas thrown into it, most of the action sequences here were pretty routine and uninspired. There's not a whole lot of creativity for the most part, and the whole Matrix-inspired slow-motion thing is really getting old by now. Wake up, Hollywood; it was neat back in '99, and I fully expected to see it ripped off in a couple of movies released afterwards... but it's been five years now, I do believe it's about time to come up with something new.
The cast chosen for this movie did have some faults, but weren't completely intolerable. Will Smith plays Del, and if you've seen any of Smith's other action films, then you know what to expect from him. He plays the same invincible, wise-cracking character that he has in all the others, and while it's nothing new from him, he still plays the role nicely. Bridget Moynahan plays Susan, the lab-assistant that tags along while Del is investigating everything. While she's not awful as an actress, she just seemed a bit boring and uninterested in most of her scenes, which did tend to drag down some parts of the film. Ironically enough (there's that word again), the best performance in the film comes from Alan Tudyk, who provided the voice and model of Sonny the robot.
Overall, the movie does have a number of flaws, but it wasn't completely awful. Wait for a DVD rental if you're a fan of this type of film. 6/10.
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ScarsRstarS
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Posted: January 10, 2006 at 8:14am
I thought this was a brilliant come back for Will Smitch. I think he lost his music career a long time ago but he acting one is pretty much alive.
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Griffinheart
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Posted: September 30, 2007 at 11:51pm
Not a great movie but decent. A 6.5/10 seems about right.
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Tristan
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Posted: October 1, 2007 at 12:24am
Love Will Smith, but not his choices in movies. I give this 3/10 for his performance. And c'mon. Del Spooner? Running out of the "cool sounding, but still weird" names already?
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Lucid Dreams
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Posted: July 11, 2010 at 2:33am
The Fresh Prince needs to retire already. 5/10
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