Review of Robots (2005) by Walter M — 29 Nov 2010

Robots is a film bursting with imagination - of a sort. It doesn't have a great story, or any strong characters, or even anything especially clever to say. But it does have a thousand tiny good ideas, almost all of them visual gags, and it coasts along comfortably because of them. Does this make up for the general lack of substance? Er... Not really.

It's set in a world where almost everything is a robot. The main character, Rodney (Ewan McGregor), dreams of being an inventor. Ponder a moment on the irony of a robot that creates another, smaller robot in order to make yet another robot's job easier. It's the kind of maddeningly impractical paradox that, oddly enough, makes Robots worth watching.

Off he goes to Robot City - startling imagination, like I was saying - hoping to meet society's biggest inventor, Big Weld (Mel Brooks). But he's gone missing, or into retirement, or something, and the replacement head of Big Weld's company is Ratchet (Greg Kinnear), a robot with a sinister plan for replacing freely available spare parts with expensive upgrades. Rodney's dreams are set back a little, and he falls in with a bunch of outmodes - robots for whom there are no longer the necessary replacement parts, especially now Ratchet's in charge.

Despite the fantastical setting, the story is simple, and it's stated as simply as possible as often as the characters open their mouths. To quote Big Weld: "You can shine, no matter what you're made of." Or real beauty is on the inside, or whatever. It's unexcitingly familiar, made worse because it's spun around Rodney, probably one of the dullest animated movie heroes in recent memory. Whether he would have been rendered interesting by a better voice actor than Ewan McGregor, who shrugs his way through his best workmanlike US accent, is unknown. All I know is, whenever Rodney is on screen, my eyelids feel awfully heavy.

No wonder he's surrounded by comic relief. Robin Williams fares best as Fender, the requisite wacky sidekick. While he does get his share of lame, unfunny clunkers - an impromptu Britney Spears impression is among them - he also gets a tissue of surprisingly witty lines. Also, the villainous Ratchet blames most of his neuroses on his crazy mother, who is played with a glorious lack of marbles by Jim Broadbent. Many of the film's laughs are his.

Best of all is the world in which this all takes place. Not unlike the intricately-placed dominos that Big Weld is obsessed with, Robot City is full of Rube Goldberg devices. Wonderfully convoluted robotic doodads make everything work, and it's a joy just to watch the mechanics unfold. It's no surprise that the film's big setpieces are all somewhat superfluous chase sequences, or scenes of characters simply moving about very quickly: any excuse to show off the intricacies and untold minutae of Robot City. But it's also enjoyable when we explore it more slowly. There's an endless wealth of visual jokes and literal puns involving robots, and the animators clearly had ideas pouring out of their ears on this.

A shame, then, about the general absence of anything holding them all together. Rodney's such a bore, as is his half-hearted and dull love interest (played by Halle Berry, whose voice is also ill suited to an animated movie, being far too soft and quiet to command attention), that there is simply nothing to enjoy but the trifling details. (And it doesn't get much more trifling than spotting all the obscure British celebrities, such as Terry Wogan, cameoing in the cast list - an activity you can only enjoy on this side of the pond.) Even the funny stuff is hit and miss, thanks to a blizzard of random and unfunny fart, big butt and dance jokes. (And I use the word "jokes" pretty loosely, as some of this stuff would barely tickle a toddler.).

It's ironic that Robots is all about appreciating what's underneath, when there's nothing to the film but shiny surface. Enjoying it on these grounds feels like missing the point, but that's just how it is. You should see it, marvel at all the stuff they thought to do with these robots, and then quietly grumble that they didn't attach all of it to a better story. Watch any episode of Futurama for proof that it can be done.