Review: 'Vice' Starring Bruce Willis, Ambyr Childers & Thomas Jane

The fact that “Vice” is a straight-to-video rip-off of “Westworld” should become painfully obvious from reading the film’s IMDb logline alone. However, the real tragedy is that this B-movie, sci-fi/action schlockfest, which also shamelessly steals ideas, and sometimes entire sequences, from “Blade Runner,” “Robocop,” “Groundhog's Day,” “The Matrix,” and “Total Recall” to name just a few, actually contains a couple of semi-interesting hard science-fiction ideas. Unfortunately, the screenplay by Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore, who wrote the upcoming Dwayne Johnson disaster pic “San Andreas,” have no clue how to exploit them beyond serving as clunky placeholders before kickstarting a dumb chase picture.

The story takes place in and around an entertainment complex called Vice, where people can satisfy their most depraved violent and/or sexual urges via robots made up mostly of organic tissue, making them almost indistinguishable from humans. During an expository sequence so...