Robocall

I thought this would be an interesting film with technology but it was boring waste of time. GT acting is awful and blain. Story drags out forever and is painful to watch. Production looks like a logistical nightmare and someones bad dream turned into a screenplay. Stay away from this movie and save 2hrs of your time for better flicks.

This film was interesting and slowly built up. It had some periods where it was rather sad to think that when we grow old there are rarely any true friends around. I would recommend this feature.

What kills this movie is the lack of direction. The actors seem capable enough to pull this story off, but the over-acting and lack of realism in the delivery, makes this a dud. Every response and reaction from the lead character "GT", seems over the top angry and over the edge. His phone rings and he is like what is this contraption, why is this making noise, who dare disturb my loneliness! Also, I dont quite get why they struggled with timing in the conversations, specifically when on the phone...I mean this move revolves around the phone, yet the delays and gaps in the phone conversations are very distracting. I had high hopes for this movie, it had a potentially good concept but got distracted by a lot of time filling, boring unrelated flat story and unrealistic dialogue and temperament! By the way, this guy is supprised by every call he gets, and never knows whos calling.

It is more of a drama and it runs at a slow pace as other reviewers have suggested. I didn't find it to be painfully slow or boring, though. I'm a younger guy myself, but it seems like it paints a pretty good picture of what it's like to start coming of old age. GT, the main character of the story has worn down since his younger days and lost a generous amount of his patience. Time and time again, he is getting calls from a solicitation company, and time and time again, he tells them he has no interest in their propaganda. As they proceed to call, he starts to reach a boiling point. He has also reached that time in his life where he is starting to see his close friends die off, and it takes an emotional toll on him. I enjoyed the movie. I'm not sure if it is something I'd be eager to watch again, but I wasn't dissatisfied with it. I was a little nervous about how the ending would play out but I think it ended the right way.

In movies, I tend to go for action, suspense, and heroic triumph, so for me Robocall seems an unlikely attention grabber--it's about as low key as film gets. Yet each discrete scene unfolds upon the preceding ones with a constant, subtly increasing emotional suspense. Robocop quickly and completely drew me into the life of widower and Vietnam vet G.T Benz (Gary Sturm) and his friends. Sturm also wrote and directed the film. Sturm is pitch perfect as Benz, one of the earliest baby boomers (a birth date of 1946 sounds about right). As of 2018 or so, he is anybody's nondescript grandfather--not elderly, but definitely heading that direction; a nice guy living alone and lonely, but no complainer, except about an unceasing barrage of "robo calls" from a solar energy provider. Benz always picks up his cell phone because he also gets occasional calls from his daughter or a friend or his doctor's office and he's afraid he'll "miss something" if he doesn't. His robo caller's voice could be generated by a computer capable of deciphering and answering questions and even responding in kind to Bentz' rising frustration with their "relationship." Or the calls might be automatically (robotically) generated and, when a line opens, swiftly shifted to a live human worker. It's weirdly hard to tell. And that is one element of the film's portrait of 21st Century aging in America: Benz has accepted the presence of computers and cell phones in his life--he uses email and accesses the web to find contact info for government officials--but he doesn't like the devices. And, despite the convenience increasingly widespread computerization supposedly offers, in Robocall life for younger workers never appears anything but hectic, almost incredibly so. As we hear (over cell phone) from Benz' daughter, she has always "gotta run, Dad." Benz' wife has died. His only remaining "family" are the friends he made in Vietnam: Riley, movingly portrayed by the remarkably versatile Gary Saderup; "Ketch" (G. Larry Butler) whose physical presence in the film is short but casts a long shadow; and radiantly nice guy Harris (Miles Cranford). But this isn't a Vietnam movie. While Benz has a few short flashbacks, the war itself is deep background. With the exception of their wives, still living or now dead, the men's friendships forged in that war are the most deeply humane, emotionally fulfilling relationships of their lives 50 years on. And their lives today--in particular, Benz' current life--is the film's subject. Robocall presents an American dystopia without apocalyptic alien invasions or climate change catastrophes. The film is the world of human connection--of face to face communion and, with it, the possibility of actual meaning--burning out of today's world as slow time itself burns out in our ever-more-frenetic, technology based, technology driven civilization. It's a slow movie, and rightly so, paced to the quotidian reality of the one remaining generation that vividly remembers a time when neither children nor adults were wedded to smartphones; when we weren't drowning in a digital sea of demands upon our attention and distractions from the most time consuming, complex dimension of all human life: love.

This movie was delightful. I was intrigued with the interactions of actors expressing the present moment from the past they lived through. I personally was touched by the relationship or lack there of between father and daughter who had grown too busy to visit or even have quality time in conversation with her Dad. Easy to say"I love you" but actions speak louder than words. Clearly the technical world was not ruling this mans life. Dealing alone with the death of his long standing friends and his own health issues could drive anyone crazy. This movie had great depth and emotion.