A.X.L. (pronounced Axle) is a new boy-and-his-dog flick if the dog is a robotic killer war machine and the boy is in his early 20s and should know better. I suspect most people haven’t head of this movie and I suspect (at least based on my private screening last night) that nobody will see it. Which is for the best… this is one terrible movie.
AXL is a prototype robotic war dog that escapes from its creators off-screen. He (it?) is a giant, scary looking metallic robot dog, not a cute furry one played by a real animal. He’s kind of unsettling to look at though they try hard to assure us he’s cute. He’s CGI in action scenes and a kind of badly matched practical puppet/robot in close-up shots.
Our human hero is a motocross racer who gets tricked by some bullies and left in the desert where he stumbles upon the killer robot dog (who tries to kill him). But they make best of friends and the film follows the basic plot of your average ET retread. Government agents show up, they try to keep him hidden, danger ensues. Oh, and the robot dog tries to straight-up revenge murder the bullies. So that’s fun.
To be blunt, this film is just really bad… the only thing good are some of the visual effects of the CGI dog. The film looks and is edited flat and dull, even during the action scenes. The script is bad. I was intensely bored. The acting is ok, to be fair. But the actors are stuck in a generic script in a generic storyline that has been done much better before. It makes Monster Trucks look like Short Circuit.
So, yeah, this is a dull grind of a movie that borrows aggressively from the many movies of its ilk… many, many better movies (even if those better movies are still pretty bad). I’m here to aggressively state that I hated this movie. Stay far far away… though having to warn you away from a movie you’ve never heard of and will be promptly forgotten by everyone in a week or two seems like a waste of time.
Score: 53