The life of a family of Martin, an ordinary family that buy a robot, in order to help them in making many tasks at the same time, has been changed completely when they find out that Andrew, the robot, is able to acquire human feelings, as he has used them, in order to stop whose creators to make them stop destroying it.
Virtually every emotion, motivation, idea, character and plot point in the movie is flat and perfunctory -- except for those that carry the invisible subtitle, 'Cry, dammit!'
You long for [Williams] to break the metal mold, if only for a minute, to remind you that you are watching the best improvisational comedian of this millennium.
...aspires to an almost adult level of seriousness.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
November 06, 2002
Columbus lays on the sentimentality thickly, sometimes letting it get in the way of the storytelling. The longer the movie continues, the more overt he becomes in his emotional pandering.