Emma Roberts was originally cast in “Robots,” a movie about two Artificial Intelligence robots who fall in love. But I can hazard a guess that she took one look at the script and went running for the hills. Instead, Shailene Woodley was the lucky recipient to be in the role of a confessed gold digger who uses a robot double to dupe men out of their hard-earned cash. Counter that scenario with a man described as a womanizer (but really he’s just Tinder trash) who also has a robot clone and you have the basics down for this title.

In the short story from Robert Sheckley’s book, the characters make space for romance by acquiring the droid doppelgangers. Subsequently, their artificially enhanced bodies realize that they would be better off together and run away. In the film, the two main leads are devoid of any such depth. Instead, Elaine and Charles are self-serving assholes who simply get robots to do their dirty work.

Robots Movie, Stream it, or Skip it?

In Robots, Charles uses his twin-to-date women to save him the unfortunate experience of getting to know them before he gets to have sex with them. In a similar vein, Elaine uses her robot to commit the deed. Elaine is then free to exploit the men for whatever they will give her. She is showered with money and gifts and then simply sends her robot in whenever there is a requirement for sex.

On the surface, the story sounds like it could be a little bit of fun with a silly idea. A satire that looks to treat its audience with a view of our disposable world. What if we could simply send in a robot to deal with the dullness of small talk? The idea is a fairly generic one, but here the premise of Robots fails on a few different levels. The comedy is low-brow and often childish. For a film like this to work, given the content, more astute and intelligent humor would have worked a lot better. Add to that Elaine and Charles as characters are in a nutshell vile human beings and there isn’t much at all worth smiling about here.

“Robots” is rated

1 googly eyes are only funny on bananas in the supermarket out of 5

Mother of Movies score

Directed by Casper Christensen and Anthony Hines.

What to Watch Next

Another movie with AI and robots, watch Mother/Android or Tau next.

Written by: Robert Sheckley (The Prize of Peril), Anthony Hines (Borat), and Casper Christensen (Klown).

You can watch the trailer for this title via this link.