Robot
Overlords
***
Dir: Jon Wright. With: Gillian Anderson, Ben
Kingsley, Callan McAuliffe, Geraldine James. 90 mins. Cert: 12A
Director Jon Wright
here follows his enjoyable Irish monster movie Grabbers with what resembles a Children’s Film Foundation offering
updated for the JJ Abrams era: we now get substantially better VFX, lashings of
lens flare, and Roy Hudd as a kindly grandpa. The battlelines between the
robots oppressing a Manx backwater and schoolmarm Gillian Anderson’s rebellious
charges are economically established; only during the second-act runaround does
it start to seem a little underpowered when set against its American
competition. Still, it’s brisk enough, and Wright’s fondness for types sustains
it: there are well-judged contributions from Ben Kingsley as a snippy
collaborator and Tamer Hassan as the guvnor of a pub operating on permanent
lockdown. Never less than amiable, and rather more spirited and non-conformist
than the Transformers movies that
have occupied multiplexes of late: the strategic deployment of a WW2 Spitfire
suggests it may hold symbolic value for our newly confident industry.
Robot Overlords is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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