2024 | PG-13 | starring Joey King, Laverne Cox | directed by McG | 1h 40m | 2 out of 5 stars |
One of the greatest “privileges” of society doesn’t divide people by race or gender or sexual orientation, but attractiveness. It’s something we innately understand but rarely talk about, as if this obvious reality is rewired by social engineering or politics. It’s a topic ripe for exactly this YA dystopian treatment where the beautiful people and the uglies are visibly separated in society . Of course, making that movie would involve judging actors by their looks and declare an objective standard of beauty, which neither an audience with a wide range of tastes nor an actor that doesn’t want to be ridiculed would want to be part of . I’ll go into how to solve this problem in a moment, but first we need to talk about how Uglies attempts to wrestle with it.
Based on a novel by Scott Westerfield, and starring a very game Joey King in the unflattering lead role, Uglies presents us with a dystopian future where we’re all born ugly and have a government mandated surgery at 16 years old that turns everyone pretty and grants them access to the pretty city. The only-in-a-YA-novel-named Tally Youngblood (King) is coming up on her 16th birthday and excited about the surgery, until a childhood friend (Chase Stokes) goes through it and she watches his personality change overnight and ghost her. Now suspicious, she befriends Shay (Brianne Tju) who tells her there is a refuge out of the city called The Smoke where uglies retreat from the surgery and the grips of their leader, Dr. Cable (Laverne Cox). Tally flees, the feds pursue and Tally and Shay learn the secret truth behind the beauty regime.
There is a clever movie to be made from this idea. Under the lens of hack director McG (who has comfortably settled into Netflix direct-to-streaming schlock work) it gets beaten into the mold of your average YA dystopian sci-fi film that was all the range – what, a decade ago now? I actually don’t suspect that McG has fumbled the sharper edges of this kind of satire, I think he’s actively avoiding them. Uglies comes off like a parody of YA movies instead of an earnest attempt at once, hitting all the familiar beats and tropes as if under court order to do so, but without a hint of irony or humor. For the action, and our inevitable escape to The Smoke, Tally learns to fly a hoverboard.
The frustrating thing is that Uglies dances around an interesting idea. When the uglies in the movie turn into beauties they turn all look the same, they all have the same features, the puffed up lips, the sunken cheeks. They all look like, well, Kardashians or at least that Kardashian style that pervades pop culture and Instagram filters. In the age of Ozympic, What a movie should be doing is not just satirize beauty privilege, but a/this particular type of beauty trend. Whether it’s 90s heroine chic or 2010’s BBLs, McG’s movie doesn’t have the teeth to go there. Ultimately, I have the same problem with Uglies I did with the superior The Hunger Games. These dystopian movies put their authoritarian regime front and center and put hundreds of years and a dictatorship between us and the way it divides up society into groups to be exploited. They don’t take the Futurama route of satirizing the present form the perspective of the future. Just as in The Hunger Games all the blame on how society has been organized into a dystopia is put on the Capital and President Snow instead of a society that allowed it all to happen, Uglies puts the social separation on a villainous cabal of leaders and a lie they tell.
Uglies is a Post-Covid dystopian YA movie in a time when dystopian YA movies proved to be authoritarian warnings that fell on deaf ears. A generation of kids watched movies where the government used fear to divide the population against each other and then went along with a government that used fear to divide the population against each other. In real life most of the audience of these movies mock the Tally Youngbloods and Katniss Everdeen’s of the world and cheer on the President Snows and Dr. Cables.