Will Smith sticks to his punchy formula in ‘I, Robot’

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In theaters

I, ROBOT, Directed by Alex Proyas, written by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldman, 115 minutes, rated PG-13.

Like so many science fiction movies – from Fritz Lang’s great silent film “Metropolis” to Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” – Alex Proyas’ “I, Robot” peers into the future and sees a wealth of technology it doesn’t like or trust.

In this case, it sees robots – millions of robots; one for every five people in the United States alone.

As the film opens, it’s 2035 and these gleaming automatons are everywhere, weaving through Chicago’s crowded streets with their weirdly translucent faces and good manners.

As created by Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), the robots are cheerful and genial, an enslaved race of circuitry and metal that do the work we don’t want to do while abiding by three laws: They must never injure humans or allow them to be injured; they must obey humans unless doing so would injure a human; and they must protect their own existence, unless doing so would go against the first two laws.

For most, that philosophy is sound – it covers the bases. But for Will Smith’s Detective Del Spooner, there are holes in those laws that are worth worrying about.

As Spooner sees it, robots should never be trusted. He finds them duplicitous and dangerous. His fears are confirmed at the start of the film, when Dr. Lanning is found dead. While some cry suicide, Spooner has his own ideas.

He believes Lanning was murdered by one of the robots. He also believes that the man responsible for manufacturing them, the billionaire Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood), knows what Lanning himself might have known – there are flaws in the three laws.

Worse for us is that the robots also might have recognized those flaws. And if they have, they might be quietly evolving, using the laws to serve their own needs while plotting our undoing.

Borrowing from a wealth of influences, particularly the 1950 short story collection by Isaac Asimov, the film is hardly original and it gets off to a slow start. Still, when it digs in to deliver the goods, it does so with first-rate action and special effects sequences that are thrilling, especially at the end when Proyas uses the bulk of his $100 million budget to muscle a strong finish onto the screen.

Smith holds the movie together with a performance he has given before in other, similar films. He’s coasting here, but screenwriters Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldman don’t let him down. They give him enough funny, throwaway one-liners to make the movie a crowd-pleaser.

Bridget Moynahan, Chi McBride and Shia LaBeouf are wasted in slim ancillary roles, but no matter. Unlike “Minority Report,” which offered a brooding, cerebral look at the dangerous level of faith we place on technology, “I, Robot” has no such aspirations. It wants only to be a fun summer blockbuster, crammed with enough eye candy to guarantee a big opening, and it succeeds.

Grade: B+

On video and DVD

THE HUMAN STAIN,

Directed by Robert Benton, written by Nicholas Meyer, 106 minutes, rated R.

Robert Benton’s “The Human Stain” is a perfect example of the importance of good casting. If it’s not just right, the movie in question won’t be right either, which is just the case here.

The movie sinks onscreen because of the casting of Anthony Hopkins in the lead. He’s so wrong for the film, he

renders much of it unbelievable, particularly the stunning plot twist on which so much of it hinges.

As written by Nicholas Meyer from Philip Roth’s 2000 novel, the movie stars Hopkins as Coleman Silk, a professor of classics at a prestigious New England college who has recently quit his job after being charged with an ethnic

slur.

Coleman’s entire adult life has been a tumble of lies, which threaten to taint his love affair with Faunia (Nicole Kidman), a rough, smoky young woman with bad manners and anger management issues who has her own problems dealing with Lester (Ed Harris), her murderous ex-husband who is stalking her in his monster truck.

It’s Coleman’s relationship with Faunia and his friendship with the writer Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), who narrates, that force him to confront the unfortunate decisions he made in his past. Eased back into Coleman’s youth,

we’re introduced to the professor as a young man (Wentworth Miller), struck by his deceit and then plunged into stupefied silence as we try to digest it.

It’s so shocking when Coleman’s truth hits, you can’t believe it – not because it’s unbelievable, which it isn’t, but because the casting of Hopkins makes it unbelievable. Worse, as Faunia, a self-described piece of “trailer trash” with a cigarette forever at the ready, Kidman is never once believable, which brings us back to the casting and the real reason this whole mess falls flat.

Grade: D

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, 5:30 p.m. Thursdays on WLBZ 2 Bangor and WCSH 6 Portland, and are archived at RottenTomatoes.com. He may be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.