You know the film. It’s a film you have never heard of. The cast might be composed of actors you know and love or complete unknowns. A documentary that sounds interesting about a topic you might like. You stumble across it on streaming and wonder if it will be worth two hours of your time. This series will be devoted to reviewing films like these, the strange items that pop up when you are looking for a flick on the streaming service of your choice. This is “We Found It On Streaming”
FILM: Wifelike
Release Date: August 12, 2022
Run Time: 105 Minutes.
Streaming Service(s): Hulu, Paramount+
Rating: R for sexual content, nudity, violence and language.
William Bradwell (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a retrieval expert for the Wifelike company, a corporation that makes robots that provide all the wifely duties to men who can afford them. William’s job is to locate and retrieve stolen robots and return them to their owners. The robots are being stolen by S.C.A.I.R., an organization that believes the robots are becoming sentient and wish to liberate them. William believes that they are nothing but terrorists.
William is so good at his job that Wifelike gives him a robot that looks like his late wife Meredith (Elena Kampouris). Wiiliam brings Meredith 2.0 back home so the robot can learn to be more like his dead wife. However, Meredith 2.0 for some reason become the focus of S.C.A.I.R.’s efforts. The organization has taken an interest in her, and it appears she is next in line for abduction. William faces a race against time to find the terrorists’ leader, The Ringmaster, in order to protect his robot wife. However, we soon find out that not everything is what they seem.
There is a lot not to like in Wifelike. So much it is hard know where to begin. I’ll guess I’ll start with what is prominent in my mind–the pacing. This movie drags. It runs less than two hours but feels like twice that long. Now, there is a lot of information to get across, a lot of worldbuilding and a lot of exposition to get through. But you’ll have that in a lot of science fiction films.
What you don’t have is the main characters going through five minutes of intricate detail setting up “intimacy settings” before first sex scene. “Open settings. Set level – sex drive – 50%. Please save.” That’s an actual line of dialogue from a film. And, no, it isn’t just a standalone line of dialogue. It comes from a whole sequence where William programs Meredith 2.0 on what he likes in bed. I don’t know if this part was supposed to be deliberately funny (judging by the tone in the rest of the film it wasn’t) but it was hilarious, nonetheless. And also, unnecessary.
Then there is the acting. Rhys-Meyers does fairly well in the male lead. The moody and intense William is a role he has played in the past, so it is well within his wheelhouse. But after him, it goes downhill fairly fast.
Meredith is played by Elena Kampouris, who was the worst part of the incredibly bad Jupiter’s Legacy Netflix series. She acquits herself better here, as her wooden acting is a better fit for the robotic character she is playing.
The problem is that there is a lot of wooden acting in the film, not just Kampouris’s. And in a film where stilted dialogue is a sign that person is a robot, and you have these actors playing people who are not robots, it causes confusion. I originally thought that some of the other characters would be part of the conspiracy in the end, but it turns out that they were just actors who were not all that great at line delivery.
I will point out two exceptions in the supporting cast. Victoria’s Secret model Sara Sampaio and CJ Perry (aka professional wrestler/valet Lana) both do well in glorified cameos. The professions they come from are not always known for sending brilliant actors to the screen, but the pair do well in their brief time in the film. It’s not a big sample size, but they provide performances that are better than some of the more seasoned actors they share the screen with.
The film does have a twist ending. While writer/ director James Bird does lay the foundation for the twist so it doesn’t come completely from out of nowhere, it is quite a change from what we had seen through the whole movie. I’m not going to spoil the ending for you, but it does require a whole lot of suspension of disbelief and a lot of ignoring plot points that sort of contradict it. Whether you are willing to go along with the twist or not will depend on how generous you are feeling when you see it.
Was there anything good about the film? Well, Bird does well with an obviously low budget. Like painting a dollar store picture frame with glittery paint, he makes the film look good–from a distance. However, the cheapness ekes in here and there. The floating screens you find in most sci-fi films these days look like they are added in using Microsoft Paint and when one of the characters commits suicide by jumping out of a window, it is done off screen, related only through sound effects and William’s reaction to it. But outside of these and a few other examples, this film looks like a slick, big-budget blockbuster.
Wifelike might not be a good film, but it’s hard to hate it. There is skill and talent on display here. Just not enough for it to be fully enjoyable. Perhaps if it had a slightly bigger budget, slightly better actors, and a more cohesive plot line, it would have been a cult classic. As it stands, it commits the worst sin a movie can make–it’s boring.
