This was the summer movie that I was most looking forward to.  The trailers looked good and the plot sounded interesting. So I went in with high expectations.  I know this is a recipe for disappointment but even taking that into account, A.I. was not good.  Actually, I walked out of the theatre stunned because it wasn't just bad.  It was bizarre.  After a fairly promising beginning, this film enters a death spiral that only becomes steeper as time goes on.  And time moves slowly. This film feels every bit as long as its 2 1/2 hour running time. The plot of A.I. is Blade Runner-lite. We are in a future not quite so dark.  It doesn't rain as much. The economy is better.  But the environment is still a disaster. Global warming has melted the ice caps flooding New York and many other cities.  And, of course, there's lots of robots. At least, we find that out later because, strangely, we see only one robot in the beginning of the film and life in the future doesn't seem to have much new technology aside from cars with 3 wheels and a high-tech teddy bear who looks and acts a lot like an Ewok.  A.I. begins with the head of a big robot-making company (William Hurt) giving his vision of a new kind of robot, one that can love.  One of his employees asks him whether even if they can produce a robot who loves humans, humans will be able to love it back.  This is foreshadowing with a sledgehammer. And  everything in this film is driven home with similar force in case the audience is too dim to perceive the important issues being dealt with. Without any further ado, beyond a subtitle telling us that 20 months have passed, we are introduced to the finished product, a robot boy named David (Haley Joel Osment).  He is sent to live with a couple (Frances O'Connor and Sam Robards) whose young terminally ill son has been frozen in a cryogenic facility.  The mother takes to David but the father thinks he is spooky, and before we know it, the other son has been cured and is home making life for David a living hell.  Soon his foster parents think better of the arrangement and want to get rid of David. I don't want to give too much away but David is soon on the run with some other robots including a "love" robot (Jude Law).  David's "mother" had read him the story of Pinocchio and he feels that if he can only just find the blue fairy, he will be turned into a real boy and his mother will take him back.  This where things start to go downhill fast as David proceeds on his mission to find the fairy.  Osment was so amazing as the boy in Sixth Sense but this role is much harder and he is less successful with it.  He's a little too earnest in A.I. The rest of the cast come and go. William Hurt is good but gets only a tiny amount of screen time.  The movie is most successful in the early scenes with his foster family.  Afterward, he spends most of his time with Law who is a kind of one joke comedy character and he seems to bond most with his teddy bear.  I am the kind of guy who cries at the movies. I even cry at Spielberg movies like when Richard Dreyfuss builds his mashed potato mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or at the end of ET.  But I was dry eyed about David and his attempts to be a real boy.  In fact, Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 do better jobs of showing the bitter gulf between humans and robots.  I hoped after trudging through the endless search for the blue fairy that we would find some redemption in the end but instead we get a series of out-takes from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Waterworld, Sleeper and Close Encounters of the Third Kind spliced together.  After you watch the last bit you may wonder if Spielberg was having some bad acid flashbacks.  Part of the problem may be that this film was originally developed by Stanley Kubrick and was taken over by Spielberg when Kubrick died.  I saw Spielberg interviewed and he said he tried to be true to Kubrick's vision and his own at the same time.  This may have been too much even for Spielberg to accomplish.  The New York Times calls A.I. disturbing and complex. I was disturbed and perplexed.