Osamu Tezuka’s groundbreaking Astro Boy comics paved the way for modern manga. They were gorgeously illustrated adventure stories that paid homage to both the Superman mythos and the Pinocchio story. While the inevitable anime series didn’t retain Tezuka’s Walt Disney–style artwork, complete with intricate whorls and addictive curlicues, it still had an oddness to it that American cartoons couldn’t quite match. The plasticized American abomination that is the new Astro Boy film can’t kill the weirdness of Astro Boy’s origins—a young boy dies in a scientific accident and his father single-mindedly builds a robotic replica that can never be injured—but it does sap the concept of its joy, its cleverness, and its heart.

Spearheading this soullessness is Nicolas Cage, who provides the voice of Astro Boy’s creator, Dr. Tenma. Cage’s voice is dispassionate and disinterested, a parody of good voice acting. There is only one moment—an ejaculated, onomatopoeic “Whirrr!”—where Cage sounds like a real, live human being. The rest of the time he is (possibly literally) phoning it in. Nathan Lane plays a Nathan Lane cliché. Freddie Highmore voices a bland Astro Boy with all the generic charm of a JCPenney-catalog model.

There is not so much a plot here as a collection of spaced-out plot points, an outline with specific boxes to be checked off. Good battles evil and good triumphs, because it would be bad for box-office business if it didn’t. In the cursed cinematic subgenre of American remakes of imported Japanese anime television shows, Astro Boy makes the overlong, impossibly bad Wachowski brothers remake of Speed Racer look like Apocalypse Now. It’s an empty vessel, a wheelbarrow for producers to carry cash from the pockets of idiots who don’t care what their children watch as long as they just fucking shut up already to the coffers of a studio that wouldn’t know quality if it battered them furiously about the head with a two-by-four.