The Electric State

Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, The Electric State follows Millie Bobby Brown’s Michelle as she and Chris Pratt’s John venture into a walled-in city occupied entirely by robots to save her brother. It’s compelling, promising subject matter that is, after an admittedly compelling opening stretch, squandered to an increasingly distressing degree by the Russos, as the filmmakers, armed with Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely’s screenplay, deliver an obnoxiously over-the-top blockbuster that contains little in the way of substance or even forward motion – with the road-trip structure paving the way for an episodic midsection that contains few (if any) elements and attributes of an interesting, attention-grabbing nature. The arms-length atmosphere, which is compounded by a hopelessly generic plot and raft of aggressively clichéd characters, ensures that the third act’s predictably larger-than-life action sequences are just about as tedious and interminable as one could possibly imagine, and it is, by the time the anticlimactic finish rolls around, ultimately impossible to label The Electric State as anything other than a complete misfire on virtually every level.

* out of ****