Robot Overlords

Director Jon Wright's sci-fi romp is so old-fashioned in look and outlook that it feels like an artefact from the Children's Film Foundation era, only with misplaced adult humour and bad language. Three years ago, alien robots conquered Earth, forcing humanity to wear transmitters that vaporise anyone straying from home imprisonment. Affable hero Callan McAuliffe learns how to short circuit the tracker implants, breaks the lethal curfew and sets off to find his missing father who heads the resistance. In so doing, he learns the real purpose behind the cyborg invasion. Ben Kingsley hams it up in true panto villain style as a robot collaborator while Gillian Anderson is left floundering with little to get her teeth into as the hero's foster mum. The scale of the film is more Doctor Who than Transformers, with the British seaside setting only emphasising the quaintness of what is essentially an elongated chase sequence made up of predictable action beats and very little tension. Pity, because Wright's previous low-budget sci-fi romp Grabbers was immense fun.