Robots: Movie Review

Robots: Prime Video Review

Cast: Jack Whitehall, Shailene Woodley, Paul Rust

Director: Casper Christensen

Positioning itself as a romantic comedy with sci-fi trappings, but feeling remarkably light on both fronts, Robots feels like it mines lazy stereotypes at times and wastes its intriguing premise.

Whitehall stars as the somewhat sleazy womaniser Charles, who uses a robot facsimile of himself to woo women to save him the time and endless tedium of early dates. Subbing himself in when it comes to the dates where he's due to have sex, Charles is nothing more than a user who heads to the ice rink to pick up potential conquests.

But when he meets Woodley's Elaine at the ice rink, everything seems to be going as usual - until Elaine reveals herself to be running the same scam with the motivation of simply scoring cash from prospective victims. 

Things get more complicated when both the robot versions of Elaine and Charles cotton on to what's happening and run away together, leaving their human counterparts playing catch up.

Robots has a good solid premise and an almost Black Mirror-esque idea at its core.

But neither Whitehall nor a script that makes both of the leads so desperately unlikeable help seal any kind of deal other than one of utter contempt that this even got made in the first place.

It's predictable too with anyone able to see how it would pan out for the womaniser and the gold-digger who are thrust into each other's lives.

Based on the short story The Robot Who Looked Like Me, there could have been more depth to this film - instead, it's a shallow exploration of lazy jokes, unnecessary C word swearing and a frustrating feeling everyone involved is wasting their time.

Add in a mawkishly sentimental ending where the robots teach the humans how to be human, and the exploitation of a sexbot Woodley, this face-slappingly bad comedy has only one thing going for it - its brevity.

Robots streams on Prime Video from July 7.