Ron’s Gone Wrong and You’d Better Save Your Receipt
When Netflix released the excellent The Mitchells vs. the Machines in April, it overcame all expectations: The animation was endlessly inventive and flashy, the jokes were a dozen IQ points above the norm, its focus on Big Tech was surprisingly nuanced and it delivered its heartfelt familial arc without ever feeling preachy. A few months later and we have the rule reinforcing the much better, much funnier, much more thoughtful and visually engaging Mitchells’ exception. Ron’s Gone Wrong, the most recently patched version of that perennial kids’ movie variant, the condescending lesson slathered in bright and marketable silliness, isn’t just out of touch—it’s never seen a touchscreen. The animated comedy about a kid who falls in love with his defective robot pal—inexplicably the only one to ever malfunction in a world overrun by them—is half old fogey lecture and half Silicon Valley puff piece, built from the scrap of better movies.
As an ironically retro foil to The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Ron’s Gone Wrong takes a character flaw from that film’s rub-some-dirt-in-it Luddite dad and expands it into a premise: The children of the world, God help them, are only communicating to each other through screens! Personal robo friends (B-bots, not to be confused with The Mitchells’ PAL Maxes) stand in here for social media at large and the devices used to access it, combining likes, shared photos and videos, games and more into little mobile AirPod cases that follow their kids around. The B-bots are inflexible little beans, with arms and wheel-legs that whir around without much purpose or excitement. They seem to have had little impact on this (presumably) futuristic world, aside from a small storage area at school that’s basically B-bot lockers. They’re not particularly fun to look at, but can be digitally reskinned to whatever’s most marketable—there’s even a Darth Vader B-bot scooting around at one point. One sequence shows their capacity to bind together to form bigger and badder ‘bots—digital skins reorganizing into something representative of the new, Voltron-like beast—but it’s really the only time the animation shows a spark of imagination, and it serves little purpose other than make you think of the possibilities for the toys.
Speaking of, how do the B-bots work? Shut up! The cloud! Algorithms! That’s the movie’s response to probing young minds, delivered by the dual leadership in charge of the Bubble company: Andrew (Rob Delaney), a sales-hungry amalgamation of tech CEOs who’s surprisingly vocal about stealing data and invading privacy, and Marc (Justice Smith), one of those idealistic slacker-programmers constantly getting taken advantage of by naughty, naughty venture capitalists. Curiously, the evil corporation in The Mitchells vs. the Machines—which clearly identifies it as such, poking constant fun—is also led by a developer named Mark (Eric André), who is Black like this film’s Marc. I’m not exactly sure what to make of this strange case of simultaneous invention, but I do wonder if it’s some kind of contractual buffer they needed to put in place so that Zuckerberg doesn’t sue them into oblivion.
Ron’s Gone Wrong’s particular Zuckster has a dream of using code to help kids make friends…only, all the kids we see mostly just interact with their B-bots instead of other kids. The writers seem to forget about the “social” aspect of “social media” whenever it’s convenient, just one of many misunderstandings and bad faith assumptions this curmudgeonly movie makes. But worse than being glued to technology, we learn, is not having said technology at all. Enter Barney (Jack Dylan Grazer), who lives with his widower father (Ed Helms), vaguely Bulgarian grandmother (Olivia Colman) and conspicuous lack of consumption. Thanks to financial and cultural reasons, Barney hasn’t been in on the fad, which has left him an outcast—even worse, one must imagine, than being named “Barney.” He’s the only one in the whole school without a B-bot…until his family buys a damaged B-bot (Zach Galifianakis) that quite literally fell off a truck. Problem solved! But this B-bot is terrible: He, like the screenplay, is stuck in repetitive loops of dialogue and makes nonsensical leaps in logic. For some reason, he can’t reach the internet to download his software or Barney’s profile, which doesn’t render him inoperable, just weird. In addition to being propped up by tech nonsense that any kid in middle school—like Barney—will definitely roll their eyes at, the defective B-bot (dubbed Ron) can’t be returned…because of that whole “illegally purchased” thing.
The pair of nonrefundable lower-middle class misfits must learn to love each other. And they do, improbably developing affection—conveyed by Grazer joylessly giggling through his dialogue—thanks to, rather than in spite of, Ron’s imperfections. Instead of being an empty shell, the B-bot is miraculously more advanced than his peers, able to learn and grow. The first example of that? When Barney is bullied, Ron hauls off and beats the bully’s ass. Now here’s a real relationship, the sci-fi film says, as Barney’s classmates serve as Gen-Z straw men (hosting prank shows watched by no one, playing online games in a vacuum, or becoming influencers quickly damned by the same faceless fans they once cultivated). This one-way understanding of online culture is the film at its most pessimistic: Here are soulless gamers and vloggers, obsessed with high scores and like counts that apparently appear from thin air. This is a world where nobody comments, nobody chats, no communities exist. There are only numbers and screens. It is a world imagined by adults for whom technology and socializing are inherently incompatible. No wonder all its kids are lonely—and no wonder why this movie feels so false.