Our Benevolent Overlords

 

KIMI (B-minus) - This is an incredibly stupid movie -- credit goes to mainstream veteran David Koeep ("Jurassic Park," "Panic Room") -- but it is fortunate to have Steven Soderbergh wielding the camera and Zoe Kravitz giving it her all as a Seattle hermit who may have inadvertently run across audio evidence of a violent crime. They make the film entertaining enough and bearable

Kravitz turns up the quirk as Angela, a loft-dweller who works for a Siri-type company (this one is Kimi) in quality assurance -- correcting and tweaking Kimi's responses to humans in order to improve the bot's performance. In one random audio, she hears a woman scream, and she reports it to superiors. One problem:  It is the owner of the company, on the brink of an IPO, who is behind the poor woman's demise.

Angela, working with a vulgar Romanian tech guy, walks her concern up the chain of command, hitting a wall with a higher-up (Rita Wilson) who is much more creepy than helpful. This triggers a big chase in the final third, with Angela trying to keep a step ahead of the bad guys and to outfox them. It all descends into ridiculous action tropes in the final 20 minutes, but it's mostly diverting fun to see how it all turns out. Surprisingly, the Kimi device is mostly a fake-out; in this case, the bad actors and the heroes still come in human form.

Kravitz is incredibly engaging in the role of a medicated millennial battling social anxiety and OCD (she has a charming habit of applying sanitizer and then airing out her hands by faux clapping, keeping the palms apart). She has a robotic gait and a perpetual skeptic's glare. Soderbergh's camera swoops and careens, and it's his sharp storytelling skills that carry this along. It all feels like an homage to '70s cop shows, where you know that the protagonist, improbably, will somehow figure out how to survive.

BIG BUG (C+) - This flippant futuristic film -- in which, by the late 2040s, humans have grown subservient to computerized beings -- is fun for about fifteen minutes but then goes nowhere interesting. Rarely has whimsy seemed so tedious.

This comes from the mind and pen of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who brought us such delightful films as "Delicatessen," "Amelie" and "Micmacs" -- a fussy Wes Anderson type who comes up with a good idea every 10 years or so. Here, any point he is trying to make takes a backseat to the bells and whistles that whiz across the screen nonstop in a cartoonish flury. He takes a serviceable cast of French actors and batters them with relentless CGI effects. At 111 minutes, it's exhausting; an hour might have worked.

The premise involves an extended family (exes, neighbors) trapped in a house because the HAL-like computer won't open the door to let them out. This cooped-up bunch conspires with the sympathetic robot servants to try to overcome the fascist overlords. Or something like that. Jeunet pulls his punches too much to keep things coherent. He has an attractive cast -- who proclaim to be full of emotion and sensuality -- but then offers up PG-rated "Love, American Style" sexy hijinks rather than genuine spice. He would have been better off going all-in on some sexual raunch, but he sticks instead with stale special-effects in this candy-colored but bland confection.