Director: McG
Writers: Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor, Whit Anderson
Stars: Joey King, Brianne Tju, Keith Powers
Synopsis: A world in which a compulsory operation wipes out physical differences and makes everyone pretty.
Remember the last time McG made a good movie? People were wearing low rise jeans the last time it happened, and even then, it’s debatable if Charlie’s Angels (2000) was good per se or if it was a simpler time when Cameron Diaz doing a wiggly butt dance in front of a mirror was enough of a reason to fork out a small amount of cash to go to the movies. The Babysitter was diverting enough for a direct to streaming teen screamer and boosted a decent script by Brian Duffield and Samara Weaving. Uglies, however, falls into the category of young adult science fiction book adaptations that retrospectively make people who read the novels wonder two things: if the book they liked was secretly terrible all along, and why, after the downward spiral of the Divergent movie series, do companies insist on trying to find the next Hunger Games franchise but decide to get incompetent people to make them?
Uglies is based on the first of a popular four book series written by Scott Westerfield. After McG’s disastrous effort with Uglies, the small mercy is that, despite the film ending on a cliff hanger, it’s unlikely there will be another movie. In a future dystopia where, you’ll never believe it, a fundamentally corrupt zealot is promising the populace physical perfection and happiness in a resource rich city. At the age of sixteen the populace goes through the Transformation; extreme plastic surgery to make them free from prejudice based on their appearance and hence equal. Parents give up their children to be taught at a restrictive school where they are considered “uglies” until the day they graduate to become “pretties” and get to live in the City.
Tally/Squint (Joey King) is a quick witted Ugly a few months shy of her sixteenth. Peris/Nose (Chase Stokes) with whom she has a “best friend/more than best friend” bond is due to have his surgery and leave the dorms where they grew up together as “Nose” and “Squint.” They sneak out of their rooms and meet where they can look over the river at the City. Squint and Nose promise each other they will never change – even after the surgery. They will always be together. It’s a promise made with a shared scar on their hands. Nose tells Squint to meet him at the bridge one month after his surgery. When he fails to show up Tally (with surprising athleticism for such an ‘asymmetrical imperfect ugly’) scales the bridge and heads to the glorious towers of endless parties in the City to find him.
Once there, she puts on a mask and sneaks into a party to find him. Everything is exactly as she was told it would be. Everyone is happy, dancing, and complimenting each other. People pose for selfies (yes, there are still selfies post the collapse of the fossil fuel era – known as the time of the ‘Rusties’) and their images are beamed into the sky. It is the utopia Doctor Nyah Cable described. No one ages and people are healthy. Tally eventually finds a post-surgery Peris, now blonde and popular. She reveals herself to him and asks him why he didn’t meet her. “I didn’t think we’d have anything to talk about. You’ll understand when you’re pretty.” Peris has had his hand scar removed, a broken promise to Tally. Before she can push the conversation further, a scanner clocks that she is an Ugly and she must hastily escape from the tower before the cops arrest her.
She almost makes it back across the bridge to safety when a flying sentinel vehicle traps her. She is saved by a classmate, Shay (Brianne Tju) who has mad skillz with a hoverboard and they bond over their shared sense of adventure, and their shared birthday. “Why aren’t we best friends already?” Shay (AKA Skinny) yelps.
Shay and her friends talk about a mysterious figure called David who lives in The Smoke – a fabled off grid community. They have contraband; such as a copy of Walden (what else?) by Thoreau. Shay is less keen on discussing her future self than Tally is. She doesn’t have her alt-image uploaded and doesn’t bother with routine scans. Over the space of two months, the girls become close with Shay teaching Tally how to use the hoverboard, and Tally showing Shay all the small hacks she’s learned to get around the computers at the dorms. Soon it comes time for their surgery and Shay takes Tally through the forbidden Rusty zone to tell her she’s planning on meeting up with David and his group – they’re real and there is a different way of life where no-one is judged for their appearance. Shay wants Tally to go with her, but Tally has long dreamed of her surgery and refuses to go. She promises she won’t tell anyone where Shay has gone.
On the day of her graduation, Tally is taken to the City but Doctor Cable refuses to allow her the Transformation until she reveals where Shay has gone. Tally sticks to her promise but when Peris visits her later, she reveals that Shay has joined David and she knows how to find her. Cable convinces her that Shay is danger – David has brainwashed her, and he has a weapon which will destroy the City and all they have built. She tasks Tally with bringing back Shay before David can harm her.
Hoverboarding, rock climbing, and camping Tally goes following Shay’s cryptic map (again, she’s surprisingly athletic – there’s no indication rock climbing was part of her education). She eventually finds the place Shay told her to rest – among the fields of the White Tiger orchids which are the renewable energy source post fossil fuels. She wakes up in a burning field with the extremely not ugly Ugly, David hoisting her over his shoulder and bringing her to the temporary camp where she reunites with Shay. Shay is not distressed at all, and David doesn’t seem dangerous. Tally is vouched for despite the objections of the also not ugly Ugly, Croy (Jan Luis Castellanos). They go on a mission burning the White Tiger orchids which are not an energy source, rather a noxious poison killing off the environment. In a retrofitted helicopter once used by the Rusties now running on solar, they set fire to the fields until they are intercepted by Special Circumstances operatives from the city. Shay falls from the helicopter and Tally dives after her saving her life (again – impressive for a person who spent most of her time on a morphopad). David decides Tally is trustworthy enough to be taken to The Smoke – the agrarian society where runaway Uglies work together in harmony growing their own food and recycling metals the Rusties left behind.
As is the way in these stories, Tally and David fall in love and Tally realises that she’s been fed a lie her whole life. She meets David’s parents Maddy (Charmin Lee) and Az (Jay DeVon Johnson) who reveal the terrible but exceedingly obvious truth behind the Transformation. The weapon Cable fears is a cure Maddy has been working on to reverse the effects of the Transformation. Tally burns the tracking locket Cable gave her and decides to stay with David. In the fire the locket activates, and Cable and her troupes arrive and capture everyone bar David and Tally. A rescue mission must be undertaken despite David having lost faith in Tally. On it goes…
Uglies even by the standards of low rent YA dystopian science fiction action is bottom of the barrel stuff. It is ridiculously dated, condescendingly simplistic, and lacks any manner of internal logic. None of the Uglies come close to being unattractive people – Shay, David, and Croy look like models. The only difference between them and the Pretties is they haven’t got a huge amount of Kardashian style makeup on. Tally Youngblood – our heroine – is an action hero but it’s made clear at one point that at the school no one does anything physical (except for Shay’s hoverboarding). The earth approximately three hundred years into the future has managed to dump fossil fuels for a synthetic fuel source extracted from a flower that kills the environment. Everyone still spends most of their time texting (pinging) each other and using ‘FaceApp’ filters to imagine what they will look like if they were airbrushed. The message is: if you spend too much time worrying about what you look like on the outside, you’ll become a vapid idiot who likes glitter and will buy anything the ‘man’ is selling. So, embrace your true self – especially if that true self happens to be already attractive and athletic.
McG and writers Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor, and Whit Anderson serve up predictable and undercooked slop lacking an iota of originality. Laverne Cox seems to be having fun playing an obvious and over the top villain, but she’s too good for this ugly CGI fest. Everyone else, including Joey King, is running on autopilot. King has proven herself a capable action actor in The Princess but her character there had diegetic training. King, Tju, and Stokes can’t pass for sixteen even in ridiculous movie land. The music cues are cringe inducing – it’s a strong case for ‘stop the pop’ on science fiction soundtracks. It’s hard to imagine what kind of teen will be vibing with a cover of a Death Cab for Cutie song.
To be generous some of the baffling logic might be explained in the novels (and unlikely sequels), but it isn’t in the film at hand. Uglies lacks finesse, intelligence, characters you can buy into even briefly, and… basically anything that makes a movie worth watching. Uglies is egregious hackery that is embarrassing for everyone involved, except McG who obviously knows no level of shame.
