The opening credits haven't even finished flashing on-screen and already the picture raises a skeptical eyebrow. The "Golddigger" song that first greets us, our first look at the hideous robot, the voice and dialogue given to Golddigger, and the descriptions we get of the bot in the opening minutes all cast into severe doubt the movie we're about to watch before it even meaningfully begins. If in the first instant Joe Pantoliano's animated performance seems promising, within moments the empty pizazz becomes tiresome - and frankly, this goes for pretty much everything about 'Robot in the family.' Acting, stunts and effects, music, sound effects, cinematography and editing, and not least Mark Richardson and Jack Shaoul's direction all go from "invigorating" to "exhausting" in mere milliseconds. At the same time that direction is oddly weak; some moments are meager or halfhearted, and at the most high-strung instances it comes across that the filmmakers are trying to whip everyone into a frenzy to substitute for the substance and earnestness that the proceedings entirely lack. Meanwhile, Shaoul's writing is rather just altogether awful, giving us a narrative that's desperately thin and unconvincing, wretched and unbelievable dialogue, hollow characters we can't begin to care about, scene writing that relentlessly zooms from one half-cooked idea to another, and a steady stream of gags (and where Golddigger is concerned, abject silliness) that could have been amusing if their constancy didn't reduce them to pure inanity.
The latter point is kind of the key to it all, for there is no sense of dynamics in the film. There are no pauses as we're mindlessly launched from one bit to the next, no breaks for comedic or dramatic effect. "Comedic timing" is a term with no meaning here. In the writing and direction and in every other regard the pacing is unnaturally, absurdly accelerated and the zest is artificially, pointlessly elevated. This is to say nothing of some intended humor, and some otherwise choices in the writing and direction (including even Pantoliano's character) that come across as outright racist, and other examples that feel transphobic or ableist. Maybe the overbearing raucousness was deliberate, a tacit admission by Richardson and Shaoul that the screenplay was utter rubbish, but that doesn't make 'Robot in the family' any better - it only accentuates how sloppy and ill-considered the whole affair was, and how questionable the filmmakers' skills were on a fundamental level. The plot and its development are so flimsy that it becomes difficult to find connectivity from one beat to the next; it feels as if Shaoul had nothing more than an outline, and it was on that basis that filming began with the expectation that we viewers would fill in the gaps ourselves. There are flashes in these eighty-five minutes of serviceable story ideas and wit, but for as heedlessly as the flick careens forward in favor of unremitting bombast, these tinges of possibility are simply lost.
Factor in how inconsistently Golddigger is written, and how little the titular figure is even involved in the plot, and it's a marvel that Richardson and Shaoul were able to cobble together a cogent feature in any capacity at all. With all this firmly in mind, I don't think that the filmmakers set out to make a bad movie; very few people do. I just think they were totally incapable of making a good one. At many points the assemblage just comes across as downright senseless, and with the basic construction being as shoddy as it is, the contributions of the cast and crew that are more admirable (to one degree or another) count for nothing. I suppose I'm glad for those who get something more out of this title than I do - I'm just wholly mystified as to how they manage to do it. As far as I'm concerned, even if you're a major fan of someone involved there's simply no fun to be had here whatsoever. Whatever it is you think you'll get out of 'Robot in the family,' I strongly suggest you look for it elsewhere, because this is just rotten from start to finish.
