I, Converse

By James

 

 

 

I'm sure we could fit a nice big Converse logo on that forehead.

 

 

There are a couple of things that no guy wants to see in a movie. And when we're sitting in a cinema showing an action flick (which is predominantly guy orientated), and within three minutes of it we see a naked shower scene of Will Smith, you just know that you're going to in for a bumpy ride.

 

To round off the opening home shots, we get a fat shot of a JVC sound system, and of course, some PHAT Converse Vintage 2004s, and thus begins the mass onslaught of product placement on your senses.

 

I, Robot, or as it could easily be called, "That Matrix Prequel", is the story of detective Del Spooner, played by Big Will, a robot hating cyborg, who comes across the death of the guy who invented robotics. Against the wishes and expectations of the rest of the world, he is adament that a rogue robot named Sonny was behind the murder, and thus embarks on a mission for the truth.

 

THE PLAYERS

 

 

Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) It's Big Willy style thirty years into the future, and he's buffer than Brad Pitt was in Troy. He's an anti-robot bigot, who's stuck in the past and apparently eats nothing but sweet potato pie. He has a kind of a father son relationship with his liutenant, and everybody else in the bureau either hates him or makes fun of him. It's not his fault that he's a malicious bigot, but the movie will wait for an hour before it lets us know why.

 

 

Doctor Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) Only aesthetic pleasure, if you're a guy, and she is a hottie. For like the last twenty minutes of the film anyway. She's a rigid and altogether un-interesting robot psychologist, for whom we could care as much as to whether she lives or dies, as we could for eating our own feces. She is hot and you will remember her fondly from The Recruit.

 

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The core of the story, is the clash between Detective Spooner, and the owner of almighty USR, you see, while he is on his quest to put a robot in every house, Spooner is on a quest of his own, and he wants to see something else in each household - a vintage black converse shoe.

 

The movie has outstanding source material, a visionary director (Alex Proyas, see "Dark City"), ever-cool Will Smith, token hottie and great premise, so how exactly did it get so wrong?

 

Well, the script gets completely bogged down with the many plot points, which are ever-so easily resolved in the last twenty minutes of the movie, and just never really manages to deliver any message that either movies before it hadn't already. There's a humanity to the story, and some awesome action, but it's never going to be as good as what the Wachowskis or James Cameron have done.

 

I'm not in any way saying the movie is bad though. In fact far from it, in a world without The Matrix or The Terminator, this could have been one of the really defining movies of our time.

 

The visuals in this movie are breath-taking. And that's pretty much why the movie works as well as it does. I've not seen a better look for the future in a movie since Spielberg's Minority Report, and that is pretty fucking hard to top. Even though Mr. Proyas did borrow a couple of his ideas.

 

 

There are a couple of instances where the CGI was a fairly obvious splice, although it was nowhere near enough to detract from the stupidity of Will Smith not being able to find a robot out of a thousand, all of whom are arranged in perfect order. How about err looking for the one that's not in line?

It was however, the action scenes that were the fulcrum of I, Robot's appeal. Ok, that and Ms. Moynahan, but yeah, it's an action sci-fi movie at heart. A lot of the stuff, such as Willenium in a house being torn down is sweet, but you know you're going to have to take things with a pinch of salt when you see Will Smith SURFING AWAY FROM AN EXPLOSION ON A DOOR.

 

Will Smith is as per usual cool, and his line about allergies was fucking hillarious. Although, you just know that now everybody and their dog are going to be using that same line, everytime it's in any way applicable.

 

It was all I could do not to cry with joy when the ending came and it wasn't overtured by a "Uh, yeah, it's Big Willy style baby, yeah, ha ha, uh uh". At least they didn't let him record a rendition of It's Just Me Against The World for the soundtrack.

 

All in all though, you leave the cinema pleased, but still, just wondering, why oh why the fuck did you have to see Will Smith in the shower?