Yep, McG is still kicking around.

The director introduced to the world nearly 25 years ago with the Charlie’s Angels movies – for which he received some praise, offset by scorn for his absurd moniker – has been a Netflix company man lately. The first two movies he made for the streamer became a franchise unexpectedly, one would assume – that’s 2017’s The Babysitter and its 2020 sequel, subtitled Killer Queen. Now Netflix hopes for a more intentional sort of franchise in the profitable YA space with Uglies, a movie that yearns for some percentage of the success of The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner et al. (In fact, on Netflix’s own landing page for the movie, it is billed hilariously as “Divergent meets The Hunger Games,” two movies that are already essentially the same thing.)

The material for this aspiring series is derived from a 2005 dystopian novel by Scott Westerfeld, in which the oppressive government du jour has designs on turning everyone beautiful when they turn 16. I guess there were too many homely incels causing problems in this world, because when you turn 16, you don’t have a choice – you get a series of surgeries and other bodily upgrades (everyone wants to have gold eyes) to transform you from the plain person you were before to a radically glam version thereof. Sounds a bit, I don’t know, totalitarian, but the good news is that everyone actually wants the upgrades, and are decidedly more fabulous afterward. (Any similarities to any society we might know are completely coincidental.)

Of course, there is a splinter faction that resists their mandatory glow-up as though they were dodging the draft. These people are content to remain as “uglies,” which in the context of this movie is a laughable term on par with Rachael Leigh Cook being “ugly” in She’s All That because she wore glasses. (Talk about your 25-year-old references.) Yes they’ve gotten beautiful actors to play these “uglies,” such as star Joey King, but they’ve at least tried to drab them up a bit.

But the uglies are not just resisting conformity and staying true to themselves. They believe that the government in power – embodied by trans actress Laverne Cox, who would be at home in the Capitol in Panem – is actually controlling the minds of all its citizens with these upgrades, through inhibitors injected into their brains. It’s easy to run a society when you have a dutiful populace of robots who are just happy looking at themselves in the mirror.

The idea behind the movie is reasonable and commendable enough, with its obvious social commentary on our obsession with Instagram influencers and their latest advice on how to make yourself ever more gorgeous. The execution is a little limp, a little predictable. King plays Tally, the conflicted hero who has bought into what this society is selling, but is destined to have her eyes opened over the course of the narrative, inadvertently betraying those who trust her before ultimately proving her worth. If you think I just spoiled the whole movie, you’re expecting a little too much from Uglies.

McG comes in is as a competent stager of spectacle who can be had on the cheap. It’s thematically appropriate that Uglies is pretty watchable, and maybe the fact that it doesn’t develop its characters very well is a sort of entrenched form of self-trolling. The “pretties” are supposed to be shallow, and the “uglies,” who hide out in a broken-down part of the old world known as “The Smoke,” have little personality beyond their ripped clothing and ability to live off the land. Characters travel around both worlds on hovering skateboards, which always seem slightly ridiculous, but also help us traverse a standard-issue dystopia that at least looks pretty good.

As the movie starts to build toward its climax – or more appropriately, toward the end of the progress bar along the bottom of the screen that tells you how far along you are – it seems clear that this is not all going to wrap up in time. Because of course it’s not. King, herself a company woman, previously made three Kissing Booth movies with Netflix. So it’s no surprise that her character is left in a tantalizingly uncertain state that promises at least one more movie, if not more than that.

Will we want to watch that one, let alone this one? “Want” is such a loaded term. Netflix has become our home-viewing cinematic overlord, releasing 93 original films from various parts of the world so far in 2024. Aren’t “free” movies almost as good as “free” beauty surgery? You barely even have to opt in. All you do is click.

 

Uglies is currently streaming on Netflix.