Now #2 in Movies on UK Netflix, Uglies is a YA dystopian movie starring Joey King (see The Kissing Booth, or Bullet Train, in which she dons an embarrassingly terrible British accent) as a girl who will undergo mandatory cosmetic surgery to become pretty. Uglies has similar entertainment value to Twilight, in that it is so bad that it could become a cult movie. Once he too undergoes the operation, co-star Chase Stokes (John B from Outer Banks) bears a strange likeness to Oli London.
There is no contesting that Uglies deals with many relevant themes in today’s beauty-centric society, just like it is hard to deny that all “Pretties” look like a walking Bold Glamour Filter from Tiktok. Like many dystopian fictions, Tally becomes disillusioned with the utopian ideal as she discovers the surgeries have a seemingly irreversible impact on the human brain capacity. She also discovers male attention, which seems to short-circuit her human brain capacity.
There are, of course, several plot points that I and other film critics (i.e. film bros on Letterboxd) disliked. The movie is rated a dismal 15% on Rotten Tomatoes and numerous reviewers believe it lacking in both substance and message. It was fast-paced, plot hole-ridden, and overly-simplified, which makes sense if your target demographic is tweens with low attention spans. However, as a tired university student, I felt like I was watching a bad Divergent parody. I missed Miles Teller. I wanted a Lidl croissant.
Remember the early 2000s romcom trope, which took a beautiful actress like Anne Hathaway, gave her glasses, called her ugly, and we were all like, “No, I’m not buying this?” Well, this was not the case in Uglies. I cannot remember the last time someone was casted so well. The banality of picking Joey King to play an “Ugly” is not lost on anyone who had to sit through all 102 minutes of this. Not to mention, she pulled off playing a fifteen year-old at twenty-five. Riverdale should take a page out of her book.
So, Uglies has some relevant ideas on the importance we place on appearance and beauty in the social hierarchy, but is ultimately let down by confusing world-building and mediocre writing, direction, and acting—but who am I to judge, with the illustrious acting career I left behind in elementary school as Gaston from Beauty & the Beast? Maybe the “Uglies” were the friends we made along the way.
“Joey King for Vanity Fair-Vogue Taiwan 2020” by VOGUE Taiwan is licensed under CC BY 3.0.