This movie ain’t got no alibi.
Netflix’s Uglies is what happens when a dystopian YA film is so generic it feels like it was churned out by an AI trained exclusively on leftover scripts from the early 2010s. Adapted from Scott Westerfeld’s bestselling novel, it arrives embarrassingly late to the party, hoping to cash in on an audience that’s already moved on. While its central premise holds potential, the execution is so bland and uninspired that it’s hard to care about anything the film has to say.
Set in a future society founded on the idea that perfection is the path to peace, teenagers are segregated from wider society until their sixteenth birthday, when they’re whisked off to “The City” for a mandatory surgical procedure that transforms them into aesthetically ideal adults, ostensibly to rid the world of the prejudice and envy which led to societal collapse. There’s a germ of an idea here, a commentary on body image, conformity, and societal control. Yet instead of exploring these themes with any nuance, the film opts to play it safe, checking every tired box on the YA dystopia checklist: a reluctant heroine, a by-the-numbers rebellion, and a villain with an oversized wardrobe budget but no actual menace.
Joey King leads the charge as Tally Youngblood, a protagonist who’s given precious little to work with beyond stock reactions of wide-eyed confusion or angsty defiance. Despite King’s capable presence, Tally never evolves into a compelling character, remaining a pawn to the plot’s demands. And while her journey to “The Smoke” – a remote hideout for those resisting the surgery – promises intrigue, it instead devolves into a series of half-hearted chase scenes and overwrought speeches about freedom. The rest of the cast fares no better, reduced to archetypes so thin they could evaporate if you stared at them too long.
The film’s one glimmer of flair comes from Laverne Cox as the icy Dr Cable, the head of Special Circumstances and the enforcer of this dystopian beauty regime. Cox clearly relishes her villainous turn, infusing Dr Cable with a blend of steely control and campy flair. Described by Cox herself as a hybrid of Miranda Priestly and Nurse Ratched, Dr. Cable dominates every scene she’s in, but the script fails to give her anything more meaningful to do than deliver the usual authoritarian speeches. It’s a waste of both the character and Cox’s potential to elevate the material.
Visually, the film is a parade of Netflix’s default dystopian aesthetic: clean lines, sterile environments, and hollow spectacle. “The City,” for all its supposed glamour, looks more like a neon-drenched neo-Tokyo clichéd nightmare than an aspirational utopia. Meanwhile, the sections of the city for those awaiting their surgeries and The Smoke offer equally uninspired backdrops, their drabness seemingly intentional but ultimately dull. Even the action sequences feel lazy, as if everyone involved was just trying to get to the end credits without breaking a sweat.
But perhaps the film’s greatest sin is its complete lack of uniqueness. It’s so visually and narratively generic that you could probably drop the film into the middle of a Hunger Games, Divergent or Maze Runner movie marathon and hardly anyone would really notice. It’s so grimly like every other YA adaptation you’ve forgotten by now, and Uglies adds nothing new to the genre. The social critique is toothless, the rebellion formulaic, and the romance… let’s just say calling it “forgettable” is being generous. Even the core conflict, a society controlled through enforced beauty standards, is handled with such surface-level simplicity that it almost feels like a meta commentary on cosmetic superficiality.
Ultimately, Uglies doesn’t just fail as an adaptation of Westerfeld’s novel; it fails as a piece of cinema. Directed by McG, a director who personifies “hit and miss” – and even his hits are often trashy guilty pleasures – this is one of his widest misses. It’s a shallow, lifeless film that doesn’t seem to understand or care about the themes it pretends to explore. Laverne Cox’s Dr. Cable provides a fleeting spark of energy, but even her sinister charisma can’t save this uninspired slog. If there’s one thing Uglies teaches us, it’s that sometimes, no amount of cosmetic surgery can fix what’s broken underneath. To add insult to injury, the film has the audacity to end on a cliffhanger, dangling threads of unresolved storylines that feel both irresponsible and presumptuous given how unlikely it is that a sequel will materialise. Then again, it took Divergent three whole movies to fizzle out, so we can at least praise Uglies for its efficiency if nothing else.
