The Adventures of RoboRex (2014) Directed by Stephen Shimek

When watching kids movies as an adult. 95% of all of them come across as bad, cheap and lame. But thing you always have to keep in the back of your mind is the question; will kids enjoy it? After all, the movie is made for them and their standards are often set much lower when it comes down to entertainment. Even the silliest and most formulaic premise can work out as something entertaining for them. So, will kids enjoy "The Adventures of RoboRex"? I think they will!

And in all honesty, as far as these cheap and simplistic kids movies go, this really isn't the worst that I have ever seen. In some ways it's a quite good movie actually and thing that I especially liked about it is that it never turns into a lame and childish one. Sure, there are plenty of clichés in the movie and keeps 'borrowing' heavily from other kids movies but it at least never comes across as lazy film making as well. It's obvious that the film-makers were genuinely trying to create a good movie for kids to enjoy. It actually treats and approaches the story as serious as possible and isn't ever talking down to kids, which is something I really appreciated about the movie. The title "The Adventures of RoboRex" may sound extremely childish, the premise may sound extremely childish but the movie itself luckily isn't extremely childish as well.

The main premise itself still remains incredibly flawed though in my opinion. I mean, the movie concerns transferring the consciousness and mind of a real dog into a robotic one. However when you compare the robotic and real life to each other, they are absolutely nothing alike. They not only look and sound different but they really act nothing alike either. It's weird to watch and surely they could have come up with a different and better angle and main premise for this movie. Nothing cute or cuddly about a robotic dog, so the premise of him replacing a real life dog works out as highly unconvincing for this movie. It doesn't help much that the dog doesn't even look all that advanced or special. He looks like one of those Japanese robotic toy dogs, made for people who can't have real pets at their homes. As a matter of fact, I think they used one of those toy dogs for this movie as well and patched them up a little.

As for the rest of the story, well to be frank, it all came across a bit messy to me. I honestly still don't really know or understand what its main story was supposed to be all about. Movies that involve time traveling are often confusing to watch, which is no different for this kids movie. It also seems that the movie was trying to touch upon a few too many different topics at times and it definitely feels like this movie could have been a bit simpler and even more straightforward at parts.

It doesn't matter too much though, since the movie definitely remains a good and entertaining enough one to watch. It has a good pace to it and with its robotic and other science-fiction elements, it provides plenty of fun and entertainment. It's fun how one of the villains in this movie is a robotic cat called Destructo-Cat, who uses sound-waves and lasers to battle RoboRex. Yes, there actually is quite a lot of action in this movie and luckily all of the special effects are pretty decent looking, so the action often does work out as something both fun and spectacular.

The acting is pretty decent as well, especially by the kid actors. One of the big dangers when doing a kids movie of course is letting kids play the lead roles, while they clearly aren't up to the task yet. Bad kid actors can ruin kids movies but that clearly isn't the case for this movie as well.

Not a great or very original movie of course but nevertheless still a fine and entertaining enough one for young kids (12 years and below) to watch.

5/10

Watch trailer