Film Review: UGLIES (2024): An Exhausting Young Adult Dystopia

Uglies Review

Uglies (2024) Film Review, directed by McG, written by Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor, Whit Anderson and starring, Joey King, Kieth Powers, Chase Stokes, Brianne Tju, Laverne Cox, Jan Luis Castellanos and Charmin Lee.

Uglies is utter nonsense. Nothing more than another unremarkable young adult fiction film to add to its generally unremarkable genre. It is dull to a fault, displaying familiar traits of dystopia and rebellion common to other young adult films such as The Hunger Games, but without edge or profundity. It is trite and tiresome, contrived and unconvincing, with Joey King seemingly unable to find a project worth any of our time.

It suffers instantly from a baffling concept, Joey King delivering a prologue of epically monotonous exposition that is parodic in its content. It starts off reasonable enough—humans destroying the earth from fossil fuels and so on—but then introduces genetically modified flowers and surgical procedures that make people people perfect and ‘pretty’ as part of the world’s saving grace. Individuals will be given this surgery when they turn 16, before this being known only as ‘uglies’. Why this choice of conceit is perplexing to say the least, perhaps we should blame the source material, but one expects at least a commentary on modern beauty standards to follow. To our dismay it doesn’t, and what we are left with is a rebellion uprising like any other in this genre’s history, only more dull and meaningless here.

It takes these ideas of humanity’s failure in resource consumption, authoritarian control, and modern beauty standards and confusingly attempts to blend them together as a frame for the film, but then fails to deal with any of these ideas sincerely. It becomes a ludicrous mess that has little of note to say about anything, a concept and setting that is wholly unpersuasive and without integrity. When it can even muster the will to actually say something, it does so heavy handedly and dispassionately in a pitifully prosaic manner.

Its banality only extends to its visual landscape, which is as empty as its ideas. Plainness seeps over the entire film in a wash of unaffecting, colourless images. It is grey and flat instead of moody and dystopian, that Netflix sheen of consumerist disinterest over artful intent plaguing the film with more drabness. Its visual effects are incompetent and offensive, entirely unconvincing in terribly arranged scenes of hoverboard riding that are wholly unexciting. Its tone is odd but not surprising; it is after all young adult fiction, trying to balance levity and gravity carefully, but moments of tasteless musical cues undercut any weight or impact the film could have, awkward and ridiculous excursions that often frustrate its tone. There is barely a redeeming quality to be found.

Unfortunately, its performances nail the film in its coffin, uninspired and ineffective apart from the completely acceptable Joey King. She is fine, at times grating but entirely reasonable, in the otherwise failure that is the rest of the film. Her supporting cast regrettably leave no impression, even the talented Laverne Cox, who as a prolific trans actor, feels misguidedly placed as a villainous overseer of surgeries the film condemns to be harmful and dangerous. The irony is almost hilarious, if not for the potentially problematic implications.

It is an entirely exhausting film, and as the first of a proposed series, its future does not look bright. Uglies lands as a completely lifeless film, with equally hollow performances, visuals and concepts. It is a gruelling watch that is another painfully dull and wasteful streaming product from Netflix. There is little merit to its existence, and while it is not offensive in its entirety, it is completely middling and empty. A poor entry to the young adult dystopian canon.

Rating: 2/10

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