Joey King Netflix movie is offensive, boring

I think it's fair to say that film critics everywhere owe the young adult fiction genre an apology. Movies about teenagers in sci-fi and fantasy scenarios radicalizing, organizing, and destroying dystopian empires may be a little cheesy and repetitive, but looking back, decades of telling young people that it's their responsibility to be politically active and to dismantle broken, oppressive social systems might have laid a positive foundation. I'll happily watch corny crap like Divergent, The Host, and The Darkest Minds if it means that one day their target audience will actually step up and fix our broken healthcare system and repeal all the bigoted anti-transgender laws.

What I won't do, however, is settle for McG's “Uglies,” the latest young adult dystopian story based on a book series by Scott Westerfeld. It's a boring and disturbingly poorly conceived film about a future in which humanity is tearing itself apart and a group of scientists decide to end all human conflict by – according to the opening voiceover – using eugenics to create a new oppressive caste system. We're 90 seconds into the film and it's already impossible to take it seriously.

Joey King plays 15-year-old Tally, who doesn't look 15 and whose nickname is “Squint” because dialogue says she has squint eyes, even though she doesn't. In Tally's world, everyone gets radical plastic surgery on their 16th birthday, but until she becomes one of those “pretties,” she's trapped in a boarding school with no teachers and no security, where everyone learns the basic premise of the film every day and literally nothing else.

Tally's best friend is Peris (Chase Stokes), and he's called “Nose” because he has a nose. Supposedly, it's not an attractive nose, but it actually is an attractive nose. In fact, literally every character in this film who is labeled “ugly” is conventionally attractive in every way imaginable. And while that could have been the point — that these “pretties” convinced everyone to judge themselves too harshly — the lack of a character who couldn't be a magazine cover model undermines that whole interpretation. This is a film that claims that giving people advantages based on their looks is wrong, and they literally only cast extremely pretty people, even when the roles specifically call for actors who aren't.

Anyway, Peris goes into surgery and promptly forgets Tally even existed. So Tally befriends Shay (Brianne Tju), who rides a cool hover skateboard and tries to convince Tally to join the resistance called “The Smoke.” Tally doesn't want to be a Smokie, she just wants to look super hot. So Shay runs away and Tally waits her turn in the operating room, only to find out that the leader of her civilization, Dr. Cable (Laverne Cox), won't let her turn until Tally uses her connections to Shay to destroy the resistance.

And there's another deeply disturbing aspect of Uglies. They cast a beautiful trans woman to play a ruthless dictator who wants to force everyone in the world to have plastic surgery, and who screams things like “All of your procedures are PLANNED!” and “You have a choice to make – I suggest you choose SURGERY!” This is not a film about rebelling against an oppressive system. It's a film about demonizing people who are actually oppressed.

I can only imagine that this premise makes more sense on paper, or that Laverne Cox thought it would come across as subversive high camp, because her presence in this film is a huge mystery. Whatever the intentions may have been—and maybe they were truly noble—the film actually reads like a stiff, soulless allegory for a “terrible” future in which people who want to change their appearance to match how they feel inside are accused of grotesque villainy or portrayed as tragic victims of societal brainwashing. What the hell is that, anyway?

Well, it is boring that's for sure. The film is depressingly devoid of visual flair, with generic brutalist buildings, generic forests, and cluttered generic neon monstrosities all vying to dull our senses. The visual effects range from competent to ridiculous — mostly ridiculous — with CGI doubles for Tally and Shay doing hoverboard tricks and looking as convincing as a mediocre “Tony Hawk” knockoff for the PlayStation 3. The only pleasure to be derived from the world McG has created is a scene where Tally is on top of a building. Needing to escape, she runs past a sign offering free “bungee jackets,” so she turns back. Even Bugs Bunny would look condescendingly at the camera if he stumbled upon this plot opportunity. It's insane, I can tell you.

Oh yes, and when Tally joins the resistance movement, its leader David (Keith Powers) falls madly in love with her and they spend the night together in a tent. She is said to be just sixteen years old. God, what are we anyway do Here?

I suspect we're just pouring grist to the mill of the Netflix industrial complex here. Uglies is a prime example of what happens when movies are treated like content, as something to fill a quota, not something to think about or enjoy, so that Netflix can technically tell its subscribers that they have a new exclusive movie this week, they don't care about the quality. And in this case, the quality was actually damned. It was damned to hell.

“Uglies” premieres on Netflix on September 13th.