93 min | R | May 19, 2023 | Neon
Charles sends a robot double out on his dates so he can skip to the sex. Elaine runs the same scam on rich men she wants to rob. Their machines fall in love and bolt, and the humans left behind turn out to be the least convincing things on screen.
Charles is a wealthy bachelor who sends a robot double on his dates so he can skip straight to the bedroom. Elaine is a grifter who deploys her own robot to seduce rich men and drain their accounts. The two machines meet on a manufactured date, fall in love, and disappear together. Charles and Elaine then have to chase their runaway doubles across the desert. Anthony Hines and Casper Christensen pitch this as a satire about modern dating and the lies people automate. It plays as a sex farce with a science-fiction coat of paint.
Jack Whitehall plays Charles as a smirking sleaze and as a polished android with the same flat charm. The joke is that the human and the machine are interchangeable, and Whitehall never finds a second register to sell it. Shailene Woodley plays Elaine with more commitment than the material earns. She gives the con artist real calculation and gives the robot a blank sweetness, and the contrast is the only acting idea the film bothers to develop. Paul Rust shows up as Zach and gets a single nervous note to play on repeat. Nick Rutherford and David Grant Wright populate the supporting roster without a distinct beat between them.
Hines spent years writing for Sacha Baron Cohen, and the film reaches for that provocation without the documentary danger that made it land. The directors stage the robot gags under cheap, even lighting that flattens every frame into something closer to a sitcom than a feature. The visual effects keep the androids deliberately plain, which turns a clever premise into a budget excuse. The editing races through the desert chase and lingers on the bedroom jokes, and the priorities are obvious. The score pushes romantic-comedy cues under scenes that have not earned a single feeling.
The idea underneath Robots is sharp. People already outsource their worst impulses to technology, and a comedy about literal stand-ins could cut deep. The film never commits to that argument because it would rather chase the next crude bit. Whitehall and Woodley keep the thing watchable and nothing more. The premise deserves a movie with the nerve to follow it, and this is not that movie.