In the future of Jonathan Mostow's Surrogates, people don't go outside anymore. They stay in their homes, living their lives vicariously through robotic bodies that can look, act, dress and behave as the person their operators wish they were, rather than the one they are. This leads to the decline of discrimination, communicable disease and crime rates in surrogate-heavy cultures almost overnight. As if the blind seeing, the disabled walking and the deaf hearing weren't enough, anyone who goes about their day-to-day life in a robo-skin is virtually invincible, freeing humanity, for the most part, from that persistent little irritant called mortality. The only trade-off is that everyone looks a bit like they're doing the robot all the time. That is, of course, until a militant organization of non-surrogate-using humans comes along and harshes everyone's robo-groove with a weapon that not only destroys surrogates, but also melts the brains of their operators. And only Bruce Willis, semi-robot FBI agent, can stop them.

The film's conceit opens a lot of potential thematic avenues regarding human identity, post-biological evolution and even the nature of civilization as a whole, and though it has brains enough to acknowledge most of these, it's much more concerned with using its high concept as a propulsion device for its plot. Which would be fine if the plot were any good. In fact, it would be fine even if the plot was bad, but packed tighter than a robot-themed tight thing with sweet robot-themed action set pieces. Sadly, Surrogates is neither of these. Instead, it occupies that awful, gray waste that claims too many well-intentioned blockbusters, the same perilous no-man's land between “stupid” and “boring” that recently ensnared Terminator: Salvation and Transformers 2.

Surrogates has so many little holes and obvious contrivances that picking on any one of them feels a bit like bad sport. So here's one of the big ones, instead: after beginning his investigation into “the first homicide in years,” Willis is introduced to a group of anti-surrogate luddites — or “dreads” — led by the supposedly charismatic Rastafarian Ving Rhames. The dreads believe that surrogacy is a lie and must be eliminated. But — wait, what about all of those New Testament miracles it was performing in the exposition? Yeah, but it's a fuckin' lie, man. Your hollow rhetoric falls on deaf ears, Rastafarian Ving Rhames.

Again, Mostow's ideological straw men could be forgiven if they existed to prop up more than two scenes of robo-mayhem, but instead their completely nonexistent ideology is made to, in theory, provide the intellectual and emotional drive for the last two acts of the film. If Surrogates had a stronger action focus, this intellectual posturing would seem like an obligatory post-Dark Knight affectation — which would improve the film, ironically. As it is now, though, it commits the cardinal Asimovian sin of bad science fiction: In a story where the robots are meant to challenge our definition of humanity, it struggles to render even the broadest sketches of believable human beings.