Worth: $5.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Shailene Woodley, Jack Whitehall, Paul Rust, Nicholas Rutherford
Intro:
There are no real laugh-out-loud moments, no emotionally moving denouement, just a bland but good-natured outing you can safely forget the moment it’s over.
Cutting the tedium out of dating, playboy Charles (Jack Whitehall) sends his robot lookalike, C2, to do the heavy lifting of forming emotional attachments while he himself reaps the physical benefits. Charles finally meets his match when he bumps into Elaine (Shailene Woodley), a money-hungry seductress with a robot of her own. It’s true lies at first sight for Charles and Elaine, but for their robot counterparts, this just might be the beginning of something real.
Based on The Robot Who Looked Like Me, the short story from 1970s sci-fi author Robert Sheckley, the film moves away from any kind of surprise reveal centred around Elaine’s robot identity and instead leans heavily into the romcom shenanigans of it all.
The romantic spark between Woodley and Whitehall does little more than pop and fizzle, which is a shame because there does seem to be genuine chemistry between them in scenes where the romance takes a backseat. Maybe if this had been more of a mismatched buddy road trip, where our two pretentious, sociopathic leads learned to be human again through the power of friendship, we could have had more low-stakes banter and less implausible bedroom eyes.
It’s a predictable series of events, with an awkward attempt at a political stance that feels shoehorned in. Jokes about “building the wall” and the deportation of immigrants all landing like punchlines you’d expect from the transcript of a ChatGPT bot fed solely on memes from Elon Musk’s Twitter.
Despite the odd moment or two of deeply cringeworthy humour — a comedy of errors leading to some unfortunate dirty talk directed at the wrong person, to give just one example of a scene you might want to time your bathroom break for — the script is fairly inoffensive. There are no real laugh-out-loud moments, no emotionally moving denouement, just a bland but good-natured outing you can safely forget the moment it’s over.
