Sergeant Jack R. Ramsay (Tom Selleck) and his new partner Officer Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes) work the Runaway squad, seen as a pretty oddball dept. perhaps akin to animal control.
Then one day a standard housemaid unit goes berserk, killing two and putting a child at risk. Ramsay deals with it but uncovers a conspiracy to turn harmless robots into killers.
CW: 80s cop movie bullshit like making Kirstie Allie strip off in a scanner because she's got tracking bugs planted on her, lots of 'woman in peril' shots
This Michael Crichton story is obsessed with hardware painting a fun and detailed synthwave view of a robotic future. Masses of things we just have nowadays or can see on the horizon are there in embryonic form. Video phone calls, ubiquitous surveillance, tracking bugs, computer hacking, very recognisable flying drones, industrial automation that isn't human shaped, tablet-like things kids read from, self driving cars, screens with GUIs everywhere when just buttons would do. It's a real time capsule of 80s sci-fi speculation and this stuff must have cost a bomb to get up on the screen.
Unfortunately it then makes no consideration of how that would actually change anything. It's just a terrible 80s cop movie sprinkled with robots and ubiquitous tech. So while the evil Professor Luther (Gene Simmons, yes that one) has assassin spider robots, a gun that fires tiny heatseeking bullets and seems to be a computer hacker who can get into anything it's just a cop movie where the ending involves a shootout on a building site. Ramsay even gets the girl at the end.
It's like they had a generic cop TV-movie script involving an arms dealer and an "Usborne book of the Future" for the visuals and maguffins and stirred them into a pot then realised the budget meant it should be a cinema release.
Godawful 3/20, almost insulting. I can't give it more for the speculative aspects because the rest of it is so terrible.