Uglies (09.20.24)

 

There is no shortage of excuses that people come up with to justify hating one another. Political affiliation, race, class, gender, religion; all can lead to artificial divisions that make the world a worse place to live in. Uglies, a new Netflix original based on the bestselling young adult novel by Scott Westerfeld, presents a dystopian society in which peace is obtained by simply making everyone prettier via extreme cosmetic surgery. This incredibly naïve solution is not the primary reason for the lack of violence and strife in the pretty world of Uglies, as we inevitably find out that something more sinister is at play, but it does represent the biggest flaw in the film: Distilling complicated issues best left explored in novel format into the lowest common denominator.

I have never read Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, but it’s hard to imagine it having less nuance than the film that is based on the first volume. Be yourself, true beauty comes from within… that’s about as deep as the lessons in Uglies gets (and the second point is slightly undermined by the fact that they hired the very pretty Joey King to be our main character, as Netflix, Hollywood, and other movie making hubs are apparently allergic to actual ugly people). The film could have offered something very interesting, like a discussion of how conforming to Euro-centric beauty standards eliminates individuality and cultural identity, or how damaging social media saturation can be to people in their formative years (an issue that was undoubtedly absent in the original novel, as it was originally published in 2005 before social media became ubiquitous). Nope, being yourself and recognizing the beauty within is about it. Uglies is one of those films that thinks it’s much smarter than it actually is, and the streamlining necessary to convert a book into a movie certainly doesn’t help.

I am harping about the deeper meaning of Uglies (or lack thereof) largely because there is not much else to it. Joey King does fine as the main character, although it is a bit off-putting when she and many of her fellow actors do the whole bubbly teenager thing, considering that most of them are around 25 in real life (not a new issue, I suppose, as adults have been playing teenagers since Danny corrupted that unfortunate Sandy girl). The CGI is often poor, the green screens apparent, and the flying skateboards ridiculous (as are silly phrases like “rusties” and “the Smoke” --I’m sure these were more acceptable on paper than in live-action, or maybe I’m just an old man who hates whimsy). As for the script, well… let’s just say I’ve seen more subtlety in a… not very subtle thing. I don’t know, I’m bad at similes and I don’t think this movie deserves a good one.

Full of missed shots and even more missed opportunities, Uglies is destined to fade into dystopian YA adaptation/bad Netflix original film obscurity. I, for one, have already forgotten it.

Uglies is now playing on Netflix

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on September 20^th, 2024. Visit at www.keizertimes.com

The Instigators (09.06.24)

 

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death, taxes, and me appreciating Matt Damon in everything he is in. Is it really any wonder that the cinematic U.S. constantly spends billions of dollars trying to retrieve him from places, whether it be in German-occupied France or Mars? Naturally I wanted to watch The Instigators for no other reason than to send good vibes Matt’s way if he was captured or something, but it turns out these vibes weren’t really needed—sure, he and Casey Affleck are in constant danger of getting arrested and killed in this comedy heist film, but the stakes feel ridiculously low because The Instigators never manages to make me care about anything that’s going on.

Sure, the characters share some perfunctory backstories with each other in one scene to explain why they want to rob Ron Perlman’s character. But this is all the audience gets; it wasn’t until I was an hour or so into the film that it even dawned on me that Affleck was supposed to be the loudmouth funny one and Damon was supposed to be the comically stoic one. Not even these broad archetypes were clear because the jokes just aren’t that funny. I did not connect to anyone on an emotional level because one scene is not enough to tell us who the characters are, and I did not care on a comedic level because the jokes aren’t amusing enough to keep me invested just by themselves. And if the main characters are one-dimensional then I don’t even know what the supporting characters are… according to Wikipedia zero-dimensional space is a thing and “a graphical illustration of a zero-dimensional space is a point,” but I’d argue that the perfect example of zero-dimensional space would instead be Perlman, Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, and the rest of the exceptional supporting cast doing… whatever it is they do in this movie.

The banter between Damon and Affleck can only be described as “Bostonian,” and this back-and-forth occasionally provides energy in the otherwise boring and painfully lifeless story, even if it never reaches the level of laugh-out-loud funny. And although it’s nice to understand the entirety of a heist film for once (usually the genre shows an addiction to needless complexity), the story is almost too basic in its straightforwardness. There are no interesting twists, no unexpected reveals. We get from point A to point B on a mostly flat line, and by the end I just wanted to shrug and move onto something else.

The Instigators is not unwatchable with its talented cast (they do their best with what is given to them) and fast-ish pace (it might be boring and lifeless but at least it’s not  slow, boring and lifeless), but it is not something that showcases anything impressive either. If only we could have saved Matt from this mediocre script, but I guess you can’t win them all.

The Instigators is now available on Apple TV+.

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on September 6^th, 2024. Visit at www.keizertimes.com