Miles Hill (Alex Neustaedter) is an aimless teenager who, due to poor prospects, is thinking of starting a career in motorcycle racing. After his rival Sam Fontaine humiliates him and leaves him in the desert, Miles runs into A-X-L, a robot dog and top secret military project who ran away from headquarters. Miles and A-X-L bond with each other, and Miles steadily deepens his relationship with fellow alienated teen Sara Reyes (Becky G). Eventually however, they are going to have to deal with the military coming to get A-X-L.
Tropes:
- A Boy and His X: Miles' relationship with A-X-L helps him grow as a person. By the end of the movie he is no longer a disaffected teen and is going to university to seriously pursue a career in robotics.
- Because I'm Good At It: Miles' explanation for wanting to go into motorcycle racing is that he feels he's good at that and nothing else (he also mentions his terrible grades). His father asks whether Miles has ever really tried anything else.
- Bond Creatures: A-X-L has a pairing system that causes him to bond to one specific human, who gets admin privileges. The human ends up being Miles. The bond is apparently nigh-impossible to undo.
- Catchphrase: A-X-L's is "Yo, send it!", which is the only thing he says, actually. He picked it up from Miles' humiliating video, much to his chagrin. The phrase is how Miles and Sara know that he's still alive at the end.
- Disney Death: A-X-L self-destructs to avoid capture by the military. However at the end, Miles finds the pairing device and A-X-L's voice sounds from it, meaning that his OS survived.
- Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: Sam humiliates Miles by setting him up to fail a bike trick, has his friend film it and uploads it to (presumably) Youtube. He brags that the video got 2000 views in one night.
- One-Word Title: The movie's called "A-X-L". The hyphenation makes it count as one word.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: In peaceful circumstances, A-X-L's eyes glow with a nice blue shade. If he detects danger though, he becomes aggressive and the eyes become red.
- Reverse Relationship Reveal: A-X-L's creators. Andric at first comes off as more humane and interested in seeing how A-X-L interacts with the humans around him than in his functions as a killing machine, while we're conditioned to see his colleague as a stick-in-the-mud who wants to take A-X-L away from Miles. Andric reveals his true colors when he sees Miles using A-X-L to threaten Sam, saying he wouldn't have cared if Sam had been killed since that's what the dog was designed to do. Later he also kidnaps Miles and Sara and threatens them in order to get A-X-L back. Meanwhile the colleague was simply trying to follow protocol and keep civilians from getting hurt, and gets more and more aghast at Andric's sociopathy.
- Robot Dog: A-X-L is intended by its creators to take the place of actual work dogs in the military.
- Token Good Teammate: Berman, Andric's collegue is this, given that A-X-L was design only for the Military.
