Do you, by chance, remember when director McG made good movies? Yeah, I know, me neither. And his latest, Uglies, won’t disprove that point. It is hard to believe that the man who cut his teeth directing Sugar Ray music videos has successfully made movies for nearly a quarter of a century.
Yes, cinema is a visual medium, but McG has always focused more on aesthetics. From the Charlie’s Angels franchise to family fare like Rim of the World and Family Switch, he emphasizes vain visuals instead of character depth and a good story.
McG may have finally found a film that tackles those sensibilities with Netflix’s latest Joey King vehicle. Uglies is a grossly digitally enhanced, special effects-driven, inefficacious streaming film whose themes are so wide of the mark that it practically becomes conceited.
Netflix’s Uglies Review and Synopsis
Uglies follows Joey King’s (The Kissing Booth franchise) character, Tally Youngblood, a 15-year-old girl about to turn “Pretty.” This is a drastic societal change set in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone lives in a dystopian society. It is a kind of graduation: when someone turns 16, they transform to become “Pretty.”
The government ensures this transformation happens, including extreme and endless cosmetic surgeries to make someone as attractive as possible. Tally spends most nights with her best friend, Peris (Outer Banks‘ Chase Stokes), on the rooftop of the publicly funded school dorms. He is about to graduate, but they plan to meet back at their favorite spot in eight weeks.
When Peris doesn’t show up for their meet-up, Tally takes it upon herself to find him. She crosses the bridge into a world of the self-indulgent and unencumbered, among spoon-fed and heedless characters. She then makes a new friend in Shay (Scream’s Brianne Tju), an “Ugly” who wants to rebel against the establishment.
McG Misses the Point When It Comes to Uglies Source Material
Uglies‘ script was written by Jacob Forman (Lawmen: Bass Reeves), Vanessa Taylor (Divergent), and Whit Anderson (Ocean’s 8). And yes, if you run out of breath while reading the list of credited screenwriters, you know your film has a problem. There are too many hands on the typewriter while adapting Scott Westerfeld’s best-selling young adult novel.
Talk about overthinking the source material. The constant rewrites of the script entirely miss some of the most basic, overused clichés from Westerfeld’s book. McG doesn’t fare well in cleaning up the mess. The main crux of the story comes down to Tally being caught between a world she always wanted and one that offers a dose of reality.
He is too reliant on covering up tropes, paper-thin and flimsy characters, and story development with grotesque special effects that are vomited all over the screen. Of course, nothing can overshadow King’s cartoonishly incongruent turn and Stokes’s wooden performance. At that point, the distraction from the special effects was a welcome distraction.
Is the Netflix film Uglies Worth Watching?
Uglies is not worth watching and could only have been written with movies like The Matrix or Dark City in mind. The film is strictly for fans of Joey King and the YA genre, of which there are plenty. However, it’s surprising that director McG was given another chance with this type of film. One of the few young adult film franchises that failed, Divergent, was under his direction.
And that’s the issue with Uglies, where films like The Hunger Games succeed. Like Jennifer Lawrence in the aforementioned film, McG can never coax a stronger female character out of King’s performance. Additionally, the film will be unable to enhance the complex themes from the source material, such as propaganda, violence, inequality, and totalitarianism.
It’s not that the political and social commentary in Uglies is paper-thin; it’s hardly broached with any maturity. That, along with plot points, like explaining how the “Rusties” came to be, how they fund expensive military equipment, and how every “Ugly” looks like a model. In recent memory, this makes Uglies the most hypocritical young adult social commentary film.
You can stream Uglies only on Netflix on September 13th.
Uglies Review — Another Lackluster Joey King Netflix Release
Remember when director McG made good movies? Neither do we. His latest, Uglies, won’t change anyone’s mind anytime soon. Netflix’s latest lackluster Joey King vehicle is grossly digitally enhanced and inefficacious, with themes so wide of the mark that the film practically becomes conceited.
