The Electric State is lackluster in every way except visually. Set in an alternate 1990s USA, where Disney fashioned robots for nationwide distribution—until the robots became sentient enough to demand their own rights. This led to the great robot-human war, ending in 1994 when up-and-coming technology philanthropist Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) introduces human-fitted technologies allowing human minds to be in two places at once via cyber space in robotic bodies. The tech gives humanity the upper hand against the robots, forcing them into a peace treaty where they’re banished to a wasteland known as the Exclusion Zone. The only catch is that SENTRE’s CPU is more a “CMPU”—that is, the Child’s Mind Processing Unit of an exceptionally bright kid, Chris Greene (Woody Norman). Having presumably died in a car accident years earlier—along with his parents, but Electric’s sturdy main character and Chris’s older sister, Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), survived—he gets ushered off by Skate’s assistant doctor, Dr. Clark Amherst (Ke Huy Quan), after he finds Chris’s brain to be the perfect processor for SENTRE to function. Years later, in her umpteenth foster home, depressed at everyone’s SENTRE addiction and the world’s dependency on it, a robot resembling her brother’s favorite toy stalks her before she revealing he is actually Chris, subconsciously transferred into that robot. Together they must find his body before Skate’s butchers—militant bounty hunters hired to kill robots—track them down, necessitating them to rely on a geeky smuggler named John Keats (Chris Pratt) and his funny robot companion Herman (Martin Klebba) to get through the Exclusion Zone alive, or at least powered on.

Power isn’t generated from nothing. Sure, renewable energies exist, but the technology to absorb that and all other kinds of electricity generating hardware takes a lot of materials, maintenance and man-power. The Electric State, the Russo brothers’ latest non-Marvel Netflix action flick, is none of this. Schmaltzy, forced, one-dimensionally scripted, unevenly paced, obvious to the point of boredom, and lacking anything substantive that isn’t directly stated, The Electric State yet again proves the Russos’ lack of talent beyond the comic page in its mild voltage. They certainly try to build an expansive world inflicted by worldwide tech-flesh battles, which should be honed by Electric State’s crisp CGI and action, but the writing’s too flat and the emotional execution overly self-indulgent.

Talents like Brown, Pratt, Tucci, and even Colman Domingo in his minor role feel wasted because they’re filling out characters that are just too cartoonish for their skills. “No thanks. I have this condition called wanting to live in reality,” a supposedly teenage Michelle tells her classmate who only kindly reminded her she needs her SENTRE head set for the lesson. Every bit of tension gets disrupted by a half-good Marvel-like joke, every bit of inspiration is cliche, and nothing intrigues or provokes. It starts with a three-minute crash course on the history of the robot war, then propels viewers into a forced tragic narrative of post-war society where characters are basically saying to each other, “Hey, we should be sad because this sucks,” or “We have to fight because it’s right!” Trudging along, desperately hoping that the star power and a giant robot cat in a robot-human revolution against SENTRE stitched together with uninspired cutouts of other and better sci-fi movies (and they set the bar low), The Electric State shorts out miserably. For those looking for eye candy and funny performances, The Electric State may entertain, but it’s probably a safe to skip.

Streaming now on Netflix