How much would you be willing to sacrifice for the chance to look like your most beautiful self? To choose your hair color, your eye color, your waist size, and never age? That's the expected rite of passage for all children in the new science-fiction drama, Uglies which released on Netflix September 13th.
Uglies is adapted from the 2005 young adult novel of the same name by Scott Westerfeld who has written three additional books in this series. Set in a future dystopia of flying ships and glowing skyscrapers, all children, at the age of 16, are required to undergo an extensive, full-body surgery correcting all their imperfections and elevating their social status from "uglies" to "pretties". This surgery maintains a city of perpetual peace free from discrimination or hatred because of a person's age or the way someone looks.
So there's an adventurous girl named Tally (Joey King, The Act, 2019) living in this world going to school in a concrete fortress with oddly light surveillance. (Tally escapes from her room regularly to explore forbidden places and then returns to her bed with zero consequences. So this whole universe doesn't offer much danger for those who step out of line.) As she anticipates her approaching procedure, one of Tally's friends decides to reject the surgery and plans to sneak out of the city to live in the wilderness with a group of uggo revolutionaries. Tally refuses to join her friend, but this starts a chain of events changing Tally's world view and her realization of what's real and what's an illusion.
This film is following confidently in the footsteps of other youth-focused, dystopian dramas, The Hunger Games (2012), Divergent (2014), The Maze Runner (2014), and The Giver (2014) all of which feature a young person fighting against a giant, controlling bureaucracy. (All these films are also adapted from popular young-adult books.) Maybe this wealth of other stories and other references in this sub-genre is why the film, Uglies feels so boring and uninspired. Even the action scenes look ordinary in this with nothing special or exciting to talk about. (The most memorable use of CGI is on people's faces who have achieved perfect beauty from their personalized surgeries. But this CGI leaves these actors' faces looking a bit misty or overly softened.)
I kept thinking I had seen much of this content before, except for the scenes where the plucky Tally rides a hoverboard gliding through the air along the edge of buildings and over the top of a cliff. All this hoverboard stuff, by the way, takes up an awfully long chunk of this film's one hour and 40 minute run time. But this vibe of recycled ideas and tired stereotypes isn't the only reason Uglies is bad.
The adapted screenplay is horribly empty of feeling...except for the feeling of juvenile banality in every scene. Nothing comes through the TV screen feeling serious, believable, or honest. But this is also due to the overacting from almost every character. Laverne Cox (Promising Young Woman, 2020) is the one person who shows some restraint as an elegantly evil doctor in charge, but she can't do anything to save this.
The performances are so unnatural and so overzealous, I literally started feeling annoyed and was counting the minutes to the end. The performances in Uglies remind me of someone who can't sing but climbs the karaoke stage anyway. This non-singer knows they can't sing, so they make up for it by yelling each word into the microphone. Like they're thinking, "If I'm yelling loudly enough, nobody will notice I can't carry a tune!" But guess what, people? We CAN tell when you're a bad singer! We CAN tell when your acting is trying too hard!
I started this film with an open mind hoping it would be fun. I don't enjoy hate-watching anything. But Uglies falls short in so many ways, I can never recommend this to anyone. Apparently, Netflix will foot the bill to produce anything.
