Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Married Baby Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Comeuppance Reviews In a future where stylish Cardigan sweaters are the norm, so are human-defending robots. When the latest-model android, J269 (the perfectly-cast Gruner) stops an attempted rape of Robgen company employee Nora Rochester (Ashbrook), and accidentally kills one of the bosses in the process, the CEO, Goddard Marx (Glover) calls in a bunch of mercenaries to put an end to J269, such as Major West (Kober) and Epsilon Leader (Holden - they didn't even give her a proper name, sadly). So now Nora and J269 have to fend off their attackers, all while INN (groan) news reporter Gloria Takamatsu (Gurwitch) reports on things. Will Nora grow to love J269? Will he live to be robotic another day? Find out, or something...Oh, The Terminator (1984)and Robocop (1987), what hath you wrought? If the makers of those movies could have predicted the slipstream of DTV crud left in their wake, would they have made them at all? Well, probably yes, but here we go with another run-through of a bunch of stuff we've seen before collated into a new package and now called Automatic. Of course, the melange wouldn't be complete without a healthy dose of Die Hard (1988), and we also have a pinch of Blade Runner (1982), a dash of Universal Soldier (1992), and it's reminiscent of competitors like Class of 1999 II (1994), American Cyborg: Steel Warrior (1993) and Fortress (1992), but Fortress is better. And Fortress (not to mention Robocop, of course) actually have Kurtwood Smith, rather than the Kurtwood Smith lookalike on display here.Let's not kid ourselves here: this is a sci-fi slog. yes, Olivier does some Gruner-Fu on the baddies, and that does help, and there's some gun-shooting, but it all could have been so much better. Jeff Kober is wasted in what is a glorified sit-down role, and Marjean Holden is a far cry from the butt-kicking of Ballistic. Even Annabelle Gurwitch has nothing to do. The whole mercenaries versus robots thing could have worked, if only the filmmakers didn't cling to tried and true clichés like a desperate man to a life raft. Go nuts! Break free! That's what we were hoping for with Automatic. It doesn't even have a Timebomb-era Michael Biehn to power things along. Instead, it all takes place in one building, for the most part, and they never turn any lights on.That, perhaps, is the most infuriating thing about this and other movies of its ilk. It's not hard to turn the lights on. This is the basics - it's a movie. We're supposed to SEE it. How are they not grasping this? Children's movies and comedies are always well-lit. There's no excuse. Maybe they're trying to obfuscate its low budget, but that backfires because the whole no-lights thing screams "low budget". Who cares if it's low budget? Own it, don't try to vainly hide it. And while the outing, as a whole, is overly talky, it's good to see they predicted the rise of the Roomba by several years.Automatic is typical 90's product, which we're usually in favor of, but there's so much missed potential. Consequently, it holds a very loose grip on the audience, and surely was just another tape collecting dust on a video store shelf. And not entirely unjustifiably.

edwithmj This film is one of the worst robot sci-fi flicks I've ever seen. The actor who played the lead role was worse than awful - he can't say one line correctly in the whole film. The plot is nonsensical - the aforementioned robot is a security guard or something who is super-strong and knows martial arts (although why he needs martial arts when he's almost indestructible isn't explained) finds its boss attempting to rape a woman and kills him. The corporation then retaliates by sending HUMAN mercenaries after the robot! What did they expect? That the humans would somehow destroy the super-strong, super-intelligent robot? They should've sent super-strong ROBOTS after him - they had enough of them! I was never in any doubt that the robot would win every time - the mercenaries never come close to killing it. The viewer is expected to feel sympathy for the robot and the other robots despite the fact that they're busy taking jobs from the humans as well as killing them - I was rooting for the humans all the way. They even have this ridiculous "sorrowful" scene with a robot head with no body with the woman saying something like how awful and cruel it is! Yeah, the next time I throw a broken toaster away I'm going to write a eulogy and say a few words... a truly nauseous scene indeed.As I said before, the viewer is never in any doubt that the robot would win, the mercenaries never had a hope; and I'm expected to delight in the killing of the mercenaries trying to make a living by a homicidal machine? Ha! The "twist" at the end takes the biscuit though. We find out the woman who was being attacked at the beginning is bizarrely also a robot and one of several hundred at that. Plot holes abound because of this: why are there hundreds of the same model? If the woman were in fact a robot, why didn't she have the super-strength like the protagonist had which would've enabled her to stop her attacker? Why didn't the man who was killed for attacking her know she was a robot and why didn't the protagonist robot know? Also vexing is the knowledge that the man was killed for attacking an advanced blow-up doll who wasn't even human and therefore was committing no crime thus making the robot even more homicidal and malfunctioning.The producers seem to have wanted to make some sort of film highlighting the "plight" of robots except they seem to be unaware that robots don't exist and thus support for their film from the oppressed minorities of electrical beings is therefore impossible.The morality, the plot, the acting, the characters and the general look of this film are completely amateur, unentertaining, predictable and formulaic. You've been warned.

jkburkholder Hey, the movie wasn't great. But for an evening in the easy chair and not much mind action..it was perfect. Oliver Gruner is my idea of a strong silent man...Not much talk but man, can he move. And Daphne Ashbrooke was not the wimpy female lead most often associated with "he-man" movies.

AlabamaWorley1971 Basic Die Hard rip-off action flick with touches of wit and even satire. John Glover as the jolly corporate mogul is great. (Particularly in the first five minutes!) Jeff Kober, as always, has a lot of fun with a small role. I enjoyed this more than I thought I would!