by MARK SLUTSKY

Will Smith starred in what was possibly 2003's most alienating film, the determinedly amoral Bad Boys 2. His latest, I, Robot, may be this year's most alienating. It feels like the film George Lucas has always dreamt of making - almost entirely computer-generated with as little actual human participation as possible. You might suppose director Alex Proyas' style is particularly fitting. After all, the subject matter is robots. But you know he's taken things a step too far when the flick doesn't just feel like it was made by robots - it feels like it was made for them.

There's a total of maybe five actual human beings in the entire movie. Almost all of the environments are computer-generated, and we're actually witness to quite a few scenes in which CGI characters converse with each other against a CGI backdrop, with no flesh in sight. It's like a big, not-very-good cartoon! At the centre of it all is Will Smith, an actor with genuine screen presence, though in recent years, he's shaved down his trademark disaffected smart-aleck acting style into complete abstraction. All he has to hang his character on in I, Robot are a couple of tired wisecracks and a hilariously underwritten backstory, which explains how he, a Chicago cop in the year 2035, has come to really hate the robots that are everywhere.

Then, when a famous robo-scientist (James Cromwell), kills himself, Smith is called in to investigate, and he pins the crime on Cromwell's robotic buddy, a glossy-looking next-gen machine. It turns out there are thousands of these things, ready for a big consumer rollout. But what if they're evil? Oh no! That would violate one of the three laws of robotics, which say that robots can't hurt people! But what if they can? Oh no! (This is the basic philosophical premise of the movie, based on a collection of short stories written by Isaac Asimov.)

What this amounts to is a lot of Will Smith and Bridget Moynahan (pretty robotic herself!) getting chased around by cartoon robots. In the end, the hopping, twirling CGI-bots in future-Chicago make I, Robot feel as cold and inhuman as polished steel.

I, Robot opens Friday, July 16

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