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Hello Cinephiles,
Today we’re talking about the 2021 film Ron’s Gone Wrong.
Story
Ignoring the fact that technology just doesn’t work like the movie portrays, there’s a lot about the movie that really bothers me. The basic premise is cool, but the world building went from ridiculously accurate to completely unbelievable really quickly.
The idea of spontaneously developing artificial intelligence has been done before. The movie doesn’t even acknowledge that it happens, going for a weird commentary on social media instead.
Score: 0.5
Characters
The tech CEO and his partner felt underplayed while the family, kids, cops, were all overdone. The main character doesn’t learn to embrace and love his culture and family so much as tolerate and use them. The kids are all shown as having social media addictions and the cure wasn’t logical.
Old east-block grandma that is completely unhinged was a character type that was overplayed in the 80’s; now it just comes off as anti-immigrant.
Ron was funny but obviously dangerous, and that was never addressed.
Score: 0
Dialogue
The dialogue was clever and had a lot of references to older movies in the same genre. I liked the literalness of Ron and how they showed him grow in understanding language.
Score: 1
Visuals and Music
This was a well animated movie with some great concepts. Bubble was well designed and unique and the colourfulness of the B-bots was awesome.
The score was so much more epic than expected and really helped punch up the emotion.
Score: 1
Fun
I just couldn’t help wondering where all the adult’s B-bots were. I don’t care if they were made for kids, we all know people would buy some for themselves. People who truly have trouble making friends are the 30+ crowd, not kids.
My daughter and son both got bored part way through.
Beyond that, the movie was entertaining, but left me uncomfortable at the lack of comeuppance for the tech company’s misdeeds, the release of a rogue AI, and the deflection of serious social media issues.
I don’t think this will be a rewatching kind of movie.
Score: 0
Overall
The movie tries really hard to go beyond slapstick comedy and doesn’t succeed. It’s a fun movie if you don’t think about it, but it misses the mark on serious issues and ethics. The conclusion felt trite and horrifying instead of heartwarming. However, there are quite a few good gags and jokes along the way.
Final Score: 2.5 stars out of 5
