It's just a saying, a robot saying...

Surrogates re-unites disgraced director Jonathan Mostow with the disgraced writers of Catwoman and Terminator's 3 and 4, to be disgraced for one film is rather hard to do, to be embraced for many films and raping a child is all well and good of course though, another robot film after 6 years of hiding from fans of the Terminator series sees Bruce Willis don the most ridiculous blonde wig to be a robot version of himself investigating the death of Surrogate creator James Cromwell, you know, the guy who invented US Robotics in I, Robot and monarchy in The Queen, and shot up Kevin Spacey in LA Confidential, that guy, guess who the bad guy is, go on, it's not obvious at all, even with Ving Rhames sporting dreads in a human only area, have a guess who is really killing people using robots.
For that matter, have a guess why this film is getting bad reviews and limping at the box office.

One clue, people are smart.

There are points in this film that close the gap between bad and so bad it's good, but the film constantly goes for seriousness and thus makes the whole experience painfully awful. There are scenes in this film that I wouldn't deem Bruce Willis screaming "Go Go Gadget Chainsaw Army" out of place, it's the level of been-there-done-that that these futuristic sci-fi conspiracy thriller films are stuck with until someone makes the next game-changer, and as the films flounder more and more I doubt it'll come anytime soon, so we're stuck with September dumping ground pieces of crap like Surrogates, which sports Rosamund Pike with a terrible American accent as the surrogate wife of Bruce Willis, who has friends that like to jack-on with electricity, yes, they even RIP OFF FUTURAMA! They call humans meatbags for goodness sake.

Mostow should fuck off back to hiding and never come out again, for an 88 minute action thriller the action was slow, poorly shot and limited, the thriller element was painfully obvious, and the runtime is appalling, it's thirty minutes too long and the credits begin at the 80 minute mark, to pad out the film they desperately, read hopelessly, add Bruce WIllis trying to get his wife off the robot machine, and it never ever feels like anything but desperate padding, probably based on poor early test screenings and March re-shoots, which might help explain the horribly cartoony CGI in the film.

Avoid.
4/10 (And that's being kind, due to it's short runtime)