Robot & Frank

Robot & Frank is about a robot, and Frank, and I’d like to say it is as charmingly irresistible as you might suppose from the cute posters all around town, but hand on heart?  I cannot. It’s OK, I guess, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough, and, in the end, settles for what I most feared it would settle for: sentimentality. A pity, as the set-up is brilliant, and the questions it throws up — are you still you, once your mind starts to fail?; who is going to look after all our old?  — so worth asking, but it never properly gets to grips with any of them. Plus, there’s a twist at the end that I can’t reveal, as I don’t want to get into trouble with The Spoiler Police — last time, they bundled me into the back of a van, and wouldn’t let me have a lawyer or anything — which undermines absolutely everything that has gone before. You’ll jerk up in your cinema seat and think: there was no need for any of this film to happen! I don’t like being a grass, but I’m minded to alert The Sloppy Plotting Police, who are even more brutal than The Spoiler Police. I wouldn’t be surprised if Robot & Frank were actually made to do time.

So, what do we actually have here? Well, set at some point in the near-future, this stars Frank Langella as Frank, a retired septuagenarian jewel thief whose children are concerned he can no longer live alone. He has become forgetful. He isn’t eating right. His house is a mess. He keeps wandering off to Harry’s Cafe in town, even though Harry’s Cafe is long gone, and it’s now a posh soap shop.