Robots

This movie starts out with two loving robots Herb (Stanley Tucci) and his loving wife (Dianne Wiest) building their child, that they just got in the mail. As Rodney (Ewan McGregor) grows he is given hand-me-down parts from his older cousins. One day after seeing a TV show with Bigweld (Mel Brooks) he decides to become an inventor and goes from Rivet Town to Robot City to show Bigweld his ideas.

On his way he meets up with the fast talking Fender (Robin Williams) who delivers the one funny line in the entire movie; the one about the big hammer, not any of the other stupid one liners there are in the movie are even remotely funny. Anyway after Fender is booted off the screen by the aforementioned big hammer, Rodney makes his way to Bigweld's company and discovers that it is not the place he thought it was. It has been taken over by Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) who has decided to stop selling spare parts and instead is only selling upgrades. That way all the spare parts robots will be collected and sent to the chop shop where they will be melted down and made into the upgrades. The chop shop is run by none other that Ratchet's mom, Gasket (Jim Broadbent), who has orchestrated the entire plan.

Rodney begins to fix the robots, with the help of the friends he's made (Fender's gang) but he can't fix them all without any parts, so he goes to find Bigweld. With the help of the only female executive on the board, Cappy (Halle Berry), Rodney gets in to see Bigweld. After a bizarre scene with millions of dominoes, he discovers that Bigweld simply gave up when Ratchet took over. Disillusioned with his childhood hero, Rodney decides to fight Ratchet himself. Before he gets the chance, Bigweld shows up, filled with new hope or something and together they lead a rebellion against Ratchet, his mom and their army of chop shop workers.

After Rodney and his gang are victorious there is a scene filled with music and dancing and then mercifully the credits follow.

One word: Uninspired. That's the only word I can think of to describe this movie. It was boring and dull and there was nothing new. All the characters were stale and uninteresting, the plot was thin and stupid and even the villains were unlikable and dumb. There was just nothing remotely entertaining about this movie. The graphics were the only part that was well done, it was obvious that they knew that, which is why there are long scenes of Rodney traveling.

It just that, I am so disappointed with a lot of recent movies, because they have a chance to make a beautiful film that is new and exiting, and yet they don't. Instead they make films like this one, that are just a patchwork of pop culture references, music, taglines and stunning visuals and have nothing substantial about them. They had such an opportunity to make something that's original, but they decided to go the cliché route so many have done. That's just being lazy.

Grade: 4.5/10