“Uglies” Review

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Society places a weird value on beauty that deserves to be dissected and explored. Don’t expect any of that contemplation within Uglies, a young-adult dystopian story that plays like a stereotype of that genre. Here is a film in which a futuristic society forces people to undergo beauty surgery for the good of civilization so nobody feels devalued. There are some problems with this societal model from its foundation, but this type of film would rather muck about in a standard and tired adventure of trying to rebel against the status quo. Maybe younger viewers who have yet to experience this genre will be engaged with the action, but anybody who has read any YA novel in the past 20 years will get bored with how little effort was placed in this story.

The strange system for this world feels flawed from the start. It’s that old chestnut of humanity falling and that it survived due to differences being shattered. Thus, everybody is cosmetically altered at 16 and allowed entry into the utopian city. Before that time, all the young ones must live outside the city. The pre-op teens are called Uglies, and the post-op teens are called Pretties. Wow, that’s deep. It’s almost like the film is saying something about conformity and beauty standards being a grotesque way to form governments. Almost.

The film would rather get lost in the personal plight of the protagonist, Tally (Joey King), an Ugly so close to her surgery date. While her best friend Peris (Chase Stokes) undergoes surgery to be a Pretty for being older, Tally finds a new friend with the Ugly Shay (Brianne Tju), a rebellious girl who teaches her how to ride a hoverboard. Shay’s rebelliousness leads to her ditching the prospect of the city for an outsider group in the woods known as The Smoke. Tally refuses but is forced to act as a spy by the corrupt organization that holds her surgery hostage. How evil of them!

From there, the film pretty much writes itself—or, rather, writes itself into a corner of an adventure film altogether disinterested in its premise. There was rarely a moment where I bought the tension or the greater danger present in this narrative. Consider the scene where Tally sets off on her spy mission into the woods. This should be a conflicting moment. She should be terrified with her mixed feelings on whether friendship is worth preserving over the status quo. Yet her montage of campfires and treks is treated with a music track that seems more suited for a dramedy road trip than a conflicting spy mission. Does this film want to be a sci-fi dystopian picture or a melodramatic TV movie to be tossed onto Freeform?

There’s no shock when it’s revealed that the government creating Pretties is brainwashing the populace. There’s a cure involved, but who cares? What does this film have to say about societal structures? What does it have to say about beauty? What does it have to say about anything beyond being a young adult template that wrote in D- answers for its Mad Libs style of genre writing? All this comes off as bland as any other dystopian sci-fi trash that has gunked up Netflix’s genre section. Except it has the added dose of completely wasting a premise that had the potential to say something more than merely showing how cool Joey King looks on a futuristic skateboard.

Uglies is a film that is so sterile that it doesn’t have a pulse beneath its bland exterior. This might be splitting hairs, but for a movie world that wants to stress that people are ugly and need cosmetic surgery to fit in, that point doesn’t stick even with the presence of such gorgeous actors like Joey King, Brianne Tju, and Chase Stokes. These people don’t look ugly or like they’re fighting for grander acceptance. Perhaps that’s why the film favors its forgettable premise of brainwashing and rebelling against an evil government. The most hideous thing about this film is that it thought such a rickety story idea would be sufficient for young adults by merely cruising through the tropes without an ounce of intelligence or uniqueness. Preteens and teens deserve better than Uglies.