Fresh from the Certainly Better Than I Thought It Was Gonna Be Department, we’ve got Will Smith’s I, Robot, an entertaining and surprisingly thought-provoking movie. Not too thought-provoking, of course…it’s still a movie largely about a bunch of psycho robots. But coming as it did for me hot on the heels of the abysmal Daddy Day Care, I, Robot felt downright cerebral.

Smith plays Detective Del Spooner in a typical Will Smith Action Movie Hero role. He’s got the confidence and the charm and the smarts and the likability that we come to expect, though Spoon’s got just a little more edge on him than most of Smith’s good guys. He’s also got a great deal more muscle–Will’s definitely been keeping the Ali physique going. I thought The Wife was going to Have A Moment next to me during the Fresh Prince’s numerous shirtless scenes.

Bridget Moynahan was somewhat less than successful as the theoretically-brilliant (yeah, pun intended) Dr. Susan Calvin–when she delivers her lines of Asimovian techno-speak, she sounds like an actress reciting words she doesn’t understand rather than a top-flight scientist. Picture fidgety seventh-graders standing in front of the class reciting bits of Shakespeare they were forced to memorize and you’ll get the idea. Smith’s homicide cop sounds smarter thank Moynahan’s psychologist/roboticist (though I think Smith has a hard time playing down his considerable natural intelligence).

The movie doesn’t really have a lot to do with Isaac Asimov’s collection of stories of the same name–apparently the script, about a robot suspected of murder, bounced around Hollywood for a few years until it got snapped up by the people who actually owned the rights to Asimov’s material. The screenwriters (final credit for which went to Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Vintar) munged the script and Asimov’s concepts together and came up with something that might not bear much beyond superficial relation to its namesake but ended up being a pretty solid story.

That story wound up being smarter than I was expecting–closer to Smith than to Moynahan on the Smart Screenplay Scale. Maybe I was feeling particularly dense the night I watched it, but I actually didn’t figure out the movie’s big mystery beforehand (though to my credit I did correctly guess Spooner’s personal issue early on from what I thought was a nifty visual clue by director Alex Proyas–I’d tell you what it was, but we’ve got a No Spoilers If Possible policy here at Moviegeekz).

Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) presents the kind of realistic view of the near future that always gets my imagination fired up, though I have to admit the overall look of the movie hews a little to close to the aesthetic Steven Spielberg created for Minority Report, most notably with the cars and magnetized roadways. Minor complaint, though–just how different are competing-but-complementary views of America Plus Thirty Years going to look, anyway? Proyas has a good visual flair for action and crafts some nicely intense action sequences, though I could have done out without a couple of his dizzying Spin The Camera moments.

The effects, not surprisingly, were well-done throughout. We’ve gotten to the point in the development of special effects houses that any major-studio action flick that doesn’t have gorgeous effects really must not have much of an idea how to budget their tens of millions of dollars. Buddy, the robot suspected of murdering Dr. Alfred Lanning (the man who invented the robots’ positronic brains in the first place), gets the Gollum treatment courtesy of the always-awesome-and-underrated Alan Tudyk, who infuses the robot with integrity, sweetness and soul. Funny that the CGI-animated Buddy shows more emotion and range than the live-action Moynahan.