Plot: In a futuristic world that imposes a cosmetic surgery at 16, Tally is eager for her turn to join the rest of society. But when a friend runs away, Tally embarks on a journey to save her that upends everything she thought she wanted.
Review: After Harry Potter and The Hunger Games were adapted for the big screen, every studio wanted to launch a franchise based on a Young Adult book series. While Twilight was the biggest success, countless other series were met with lukewarm receptions yet still delivered multiple sequels. It has been several years since The Maze Runner, Percy Jackson, and Divergent stopped adding to their intellectual property while countless others failed to get past an initial entry. Based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Scott Westerfeld, Uglies is Netflix‘s belated attempt to attract the YA audience with what is intended to be the first in a potential quadrilogy. Led by up-and-coming star Joey King, who also produces the film, Uglies is as generic as dystopian films can get and misses the subtext that the novel tried to relay about the perils of vanity and superficiality.
Uglies is set in a dystopian future where society has collapsed due to war and climate change. When scientists develop a flower that solves all issues, a class divide separates the Pretties from the Rusties. Pretties begin life as “ugly” children who are given cosmetic surgery at the age of sixteen, which transforms them into perfect human beings, which they claim prevents any conflict between people. Rusties are those who cling to the old, natural form of society, live outside of protected cities and are treated as the enemies of Pretties. On the cusp of her sixteenth birthday, we meet Tally Youngblood (Joey King) and her best friend, Peris (Chase Stokes), who are ready to transform into Pretties. After Peris leaves, Tally befriends Shay (Brianne Tju), who runs away to join renegade Rusties leader David (Keith Powers). When Tally’s birthday arrives, she is recruited by Dr Cable (Laverne Cox), leader of the city, to track down Shay and rescue her from David and the Rusties. Knowing it may be her only way to become a Pretty, Tally heads out on the quest, prepared to betray the Rusties to get what she wants.
From there, Uglies follows the same formula as almost every YA franchise mentioned in this review. Assuming the Rusties are the bad guys, Tally learns their ways, lives alongside them, and discovers that Dr. Cable and the Pretties have been lying to her all along. But it is already too late as her betrayal sets the Pretties on a path to destroy the Rusties, and only Tally, her newfound fighting skills, and her warrior spirit can save the day. There are the requisite characters who distrust Tally from the start and the love interest who sees who she truly is in her soul and helps sway Tally to join their cause, resulting in an epic showdown between the two enemy factions. It also means that along the way, we have some unsubtle explanations as to how cosmetic surgery has mutated the brains of the Pretties, making them into actual monsters. The last time a film tried to trash a specific medical specialty through heavy-handed science fiction, we had John Travolta in Battlefield: Earth, and look how that turned out.
Joey King has proven to be a talented actor with a substantial range in action films, The Princess and Bullet Train, drama in the Fargo and The Act series, and comedy in The Kissing Booth trilogy. The twenty-five-year-old actress is borderline credible as a sixteen-year-old but cannot overcome the hammy dialogue she has to spout in this film. On the other end of things, Laverne Cox seems to have a blast hamming it up as the villainous Dr. Cable, with none of her scenes coming anywhere close to feeling serious or threatening. Most of this cast barely manages to muster more than the most superficial of emotional responses, with Keith Powers and Brianne Tju coming the closest. At 100 minutes, Uglies chugs along briskly and rarely slows down to invest in much actual character development. The characters speak most of the depth in this film through weak, wooden, expository dialogue, and the audience needs little to no investment to care about anything that happens.
Adapted by Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor, and Whit Anderson, Uglies keeps fairly close to Scott Westerfeld’s novel and retains the links for the three subsequent entries in the book series. Director McG, helming his fourth consecutive Netflix feature film, shows almost none of the visual swagger his two Charlie’s Angels films boasted over twenty years ago. Uglies looks and feels generic, with some of the costumes serving as blatant rip-offs from the Tron costume department. None of the action sequences feel distinct from this movie, and the production values are lifted from The Maze Runner, while the cool hoverboards are a carbon copy of the iconic Back to the Future Part II boards. It also does not help that while the novel featured a message about body image and dysphoria, the idea of ugly and pretty being a distinction carries no depth. Because none of the actors portraying uglies are in any way unattractive, it further undermines the message the novel is trying to convey.
Uglies is not a very good movie, and it starts with the lack of anything truly distinct about this compared to the numerous other dystopian teen movies out there. Joey King is underused as a character with nothing special about her despite attempts to show why she deserves to be the movie’s heroine. Equally, McG fails to elevate the already weak screenplay to any level on par with his prior directorial efforts, resulting in a borderline offensive movie in how bland it is. Uglies is yet another Netflix project that tries to be more than it can be with a talented cast squandered on cheesy dialogue and underbaked plot elements. Avoid this one unless your teenage child demands that you watch it with them.