107 min | PG | October 22, 2021 | 20th Century Studios
Every kid has a robot best friend wired into a social network. Barney gets a defective one named Ron that cannot follow the rules. The glitch turns out to be the only honest thing in his life.
Barney Pudowski is a middle school kid with no friends and no B-bot. The B-bot is a walking, talking robot that every other child owns. It learns your likes, connects you to a social network, and manufactures the friendships that childhood used to require effort to build. Barney’s father Graham and his grandmother Donka finally scrape together a unit for his birthday. The one they get is defective. Ron’s Gone Wrong is about whether a friend who actually pays attention beats a device engineered to keep you scrolling.
Jack Dylan Grazer plays Barney with the specific awkwardness of a kid who has memorized how to be invisible. He wants the B-bot to make him normal. Zach Galifianakis voices Ron as a literal-minded machine that takes every instruction at face value and stumbles into honesty because it cannot fake anything. The comedy comes from Ron’s failure to perform the smoothness the other bots are programmed to deliver. Ed Helms gives Graham a frazzled decency as a father who sells novelty gadgets and cannot reach his own son. Olivia Colman steals scenes as Donka, the grandmother who threatens the robot with a shovel and means it.
Sarah Smith and Jean-Philippe Vine direct the film with a clean visual logic that contrasts two kinds of design. The B-bots are smooth white capsules with glowing faces, frictionless and identical, built to disappear into the hand. Ron glitches, sparks, and moves wrong, and the animators give his errors real weight so the malfunction reads as personality instead of slapstick. The script by Smith and Peter Baynham builds its world around a tech keynote and a Silicon Valley campus, with Justice Smith voicing the idealist founder Marc against Rob Delaney’s growth-obsessed Andrew. The lighting shifts from the cold blue of the corporate launch to warmer tones once Barney and Ron leave the network behind. The production design understands that the horror of the B-bot is how pleasant it looks.
The satire stays gentle. The film names data harvesting, algorithmic friendship, and a CEO who treats children as a userbase, then pulls back before the critique can draw blood. It wants to warn you about Big Tech and reassure you at the same time, and those two goals blunt each other. What survives is the friendship at the center, which the film earns through small moments rather than spectacle. Ron’s Gone Wrong knows exactly what it wants to say about the machines raising our kids. It just says it politely.