‘Uglies’ Review: Dystopian Netflix Movie Is Boring, Baffling and Insulting

I think it’s fair to say film critics everywhere owe the YA genre an apology. Films about teens in sci-fi and fantasy settings who radicalize, organize, and tear down dystopian empires may be a little hokey and repetitive, but in retrospect, spending decades telling young people it’s their responsibility to be politically active and dismantle broken, oppressive social systems might have laid some positive groundwork. I’ll happily sit through hackneyed junk like “Divergent” and “The Host” and “The Darkest Minds” if it means one day their target audience will actually rise up and fix our broken health care system and repeal all the bigoted anti-transgender laws.

What I will not do is settle for McG’s “Uglies,” the latest YA dystopia yarn, based on a series of books by Scott Westerfeld. It’s a boring and disturbingly ill-conceived motion picture about a future where humanity tore itself apart, so a group of scientists decided to end all human conflict by — according to the opening voice-over — using eugenics to create an oppressive new caste system. We’re 90 seconds into the film and it’s already impossible to take it seriously.

Joey King stars as a 15-year-old named Tally, who doesn’t look 15, and whose nickname is “Squint” because according to the dialogue she has squinty eyes, even though she doesn’t. In Tally’s world everyone gets radical cosmetic surgery on their 16th birthday, but until she becomes one of those “Pretties” she’s trapped in a boarding school with no teachers and no security where everyone learns the basic premise of the movie every day, and literally nothing else.

Tally’s best friend is Peris (Chase Stokes), and he’s called “Nose” because he has a nose. Supposedly it’s not an attractive nose, but it’s actually an attractive nose. In fact, literally every character in this movie who is called “ugly” is conventionally attractive in every conceivable way. And while that could have been the point — that these “Pretties” have convinced everyone to judge themselves too harshly — the absence of any character who couldn’t be a magazine cover model undermines that whole interpretation. This is a movie that claims it’s wrong to give advantages to people based on physical appearance, and they literally only cast extremely pretty people, even when the roles specifically call for actors who aren’t.

Anyway, Peris gets the surgery and immediately forgets Tally ever existed, so Tally befriends Shay (Brianne Tju), who rides a bitchin’ hover skateboard and tries to convince Tally to join the resistance, called “The Smoke.” Tally doesn’t want to be a Smokie, she just wants to be smoking hot. So Shay runs off and Tally waits for her turn in the surgery chamber, only to find that their civilization’s leader, Dr. Cable (Laverne Cox), won’t let her transition until Tally uses her connections to Shay to help destroy the resistance.

And there’s another fundamentally unsettling part of “Uglies.” They’ve cast a beautiful trans woman to play a ruthless dictator who wants to force everyone in the world to have cosmetic surgery, and who yells things like “All of your procedures have been SCHEDULED!” and “You have a choice to make — I suggest you choose SURGERY!” This is not a movie about rising up against an oppressive system. It’s a movie that plays into the demonization of people who are actually oppressed.

I can only imagine that this premise made more sense on the page, or that Laverne Cox thought it would play out like subversive high camp, because her presence in this movie is a big head-scratcher. Whatever the intentions may have been — and perhaps they were truly noble — the way the movie actually reads is as a stiff, soulless allegory for a “terrible” future where people who want to change their appearance to match how they feel inside are accused of grotesque villainy, or depicted as tragic victims of social brainwashing. What the hell even is this?

Well, it’s boring that’s for sure. The film is depressingly devoid of visual flair, with generic brutalist buildings, generic forests and cluttered generic neon monstrosities, all competing to dull our senses. The visual effects range from competent to laughable — mostly laughable — with CGI doubles for Tally and Shay doing hoverboard tricks and looking as convincing as a mid-tier PlayStation 3 “Tony Hawk” knockoff. The only pleasure one can derive from the world McG has created is in a scene where Tally is at the top of a building. She needs to escape, and she runs past a sign offering free “Bungee Jackets,” so she doubles back. Even Bugs Bunny would look patronizingly into the camera if he stumbled across that plot convenience. It’s wacky, I tell you.

Oh yeah, and when Tally joins the resistance movement their leader, David (Keith Powers), falls madly in love with her and they spend the night together in a tent. She is supposed to be barely sixteen years old. Jesus Christ, what are we even doing here?

I suspect what we’re doing here is throwing grist into the mill of the Netflix industrial complex. “Uglies” is a textbook example of what happens when movies are treated like content, something to fill a quota, not to be thought about or enjoyed, so that Netflix can tell their subscribers technically they have a new exclusive movie this week, quality be damned. And in this case quality was indeed damned. It was damned straight to hell.

“Uglies” premieres on Netflix on Sept. 13.

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