THIS was supposed to be Stanley Kubrick's last film. Instead, his vision, fostered over 20 years, has been realised by Steven Spielberg, not the first choice you might consider to be his tribute act.

Consequently, A.I. Artificial Intelligence is neither a psychological Kubrick movie nor a Spielberg feast of the imagination. Instead, it is too adult for children and insufficiently grown-up for those who have parted company with their teddy bear (and more of teddy later).

High-art Kubrick is a cold-hearted philosopher, a provocative and original film maker, strong on intimate, often painful detail. Big-budget Spielberg is a warm and sentimental storyteller, the master of the grand scale, the prince of popcorn entertainment. Put the two together - the think piece and the don't blink piece - and the result should be a work of intelligence, bursting with ideas about man's foibles and follies, bolstered by an emotional overload. Fine in principle, but in practice, for all Spielberg's visual elan, the Disney in him takes over.

He starts well, however, establishing an ascetic world of the near future in which robots are skilled in performing everyday tasks, understanding commands and looking more human than the average boy band.

In the name of technological advance, William Hurt's avuncular Professor designs David (eerie Haley Joel Osment, from The Sixth Sense), a robo-boy machine capable of experiencing real feelings. He is programmed to love his adoptive parents (Frances O'Connor, Sam Robards) but will they love him in return, grieving as they are for their comatose son, frozen in cryogenics?

Once the boy returns, jealousies kick in, and Mommy leaves David to fend for himself in a wood, with only supertoy Teddy for company, in the manner of Eddie Murphy's wise-ass in Shrek. Off he goes on a 2,000-year odyssey (very odd-yssey) with cocky, talkative Teddy and robo-lover Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), and it is here that Spielberg goes awry in grotesque Rouge City and the Flesh Fair amphitheatre, where scrap-metal robots are treated like Christians being thrown to the lions.

Mad Max has already been there, done that better, and adult gore, as opposed to the stuff of Jurassic Park, finds Spielberg wanting, while the dialogue becomes as awkward and ungainly as a square wheel.

Shiny-skinned, snake-hipped Jude appears to be on loan from another film - a Law unto himself with aspirations to be in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, still the daddy of all robot movies.

By the time the aliens have taken over Manhattan at the end of the world - and those scenes are newly discomforting in the wake of last week's devastation - A.I.'s initial lofty quest for comprehending man's need to advance science and hot-house evolution has gone AWOL. Instead, the natural order of a Spielberg movie has taken over: the importance of a happy family unit and feeling loved. Watch in frustration, and with mocking laughter, as A.I. becomes ET all over again.