In a distant dystopian future, after the world has been ravaged by humanity’s excesses of greed, a balance has finally been struck. A new society has grown from the ashes of the ‘rusties’ and their old ways, where mankind lives in a world of plenty, their tech and cities powered by a miracle fuel, grown from a genetically engineered species of orchid. As a result, humans live in a blissful state of constant parties, excess and joy, having finally conquered the greatest source of strife between people, ugliness. At the age of 16, every person is made one of the ‘Pretties’; cosmetically enhanced to a state of physical perfection and now able to live out their existence amongst the beautiful people in the soaring futuristic spires of The City.

Tally (Joey King) is one of the ‘Uglies’. As a 15-year-old, not yet old enough to take the Pretty Procedure, she must while out her days with her three months older bestie Peris (Chase Stokes), dreaming of being beautiful and watching the parties in The City from their guarded concrete brutalist dorms outside. But when Peris ascends first, and seems to forget her entirely Tally begins, at the prompting her new pal Shay (Brianne Tju), to question her assumptions about the world. As she teeters on the brink of her 16th birthday, she learns that there may be far more to the world, through the mysterious David, and the whispers of the those who live outside their society in The Smoke.

At the time of writing, Uglies is currently the number 1 film on Netflix. This particular accolade, as we saw six months ago with Damsel, while a signifier of curious popularity is certainly not one of any great quality.  Unsurprisingly it also shares many of the same flaws. It’s competently shot, if wholly unoriginal and uninspiring, but the world of Uglies never makes much sense. There’s next to no world building, and the film spends more time showing Tally learn to fly a hoverboard than it does explaining anything about the society in which she lives, outside of a clunky opening voiceover that feels like a band-aid stretched over a bullet hole.

While some choices, such as casting a bevy of unarguably attractive people to play the ‘Uglies’, can be ascribed to making a point about unrealistic beauty standards, it’s more bizarre that the main cast are all in their mid- or late-20s playing 15 and 16 year olds. This wouldn’t be a problem if they actually looked close to the age. Even King, whose diminutive height helps to sell things slightly can’t cut it as 10 years under her real age. But when it comes to Tju, and Stokes, they don’t even look like teenagers, which gives the movie a bizarre dissonance when they are talking and acting like bratty and silly adolescents. The handful of adults in the movie don’t fare any better, with Charmin Lee and Ja DeVon Johnson as a pair of Smokie scientists adding little but exposition. Meanwhile, Laverne Cox struggles as the tyrannical, yet ridiculously underwritten, Dr. Cable, but at least she chews the scenery a little.

But the real issue with the story is that it’s told so poorly, and in such a badly-paced manner that it’s both boring and infuriating to watch. The film, based on the first book in Scott Westerfeld’s successful Young Adult novel series, has been in the works for many years, and after some development hell, the movie itself was shot back in 2021.  While the reasons for its delay in release are unknown, considering the massive amount of montages, voiceovers, and the film’s restless and impatient pacing, it’s hard to argue that it could well be down to excessive recutting and reworking from a longer script. The result is a film that’s even more shallow and vacuous than the beauty-obsessed society it portrays.

This is the worst sort of YA garbage. A film that feels like a cobbling together of bits of the Harry Potter, Divergent, Maze Runner and Hunger Games franchises lashed to a fart of angsty teen drama that’s so flimsy that it makes you wonder how on earth this ever got made. It’s worse still because it’s so full of junk-food banality that it’s quite likely that it will be watched over and over by the same sort of kids who pushed Damsel to the similar spot, much to the chagrin of their parents.

There’s really little to recommend this, other than to see how badly wrong things like this can go, and to give a new appreciation for how good some of the existing films in this genre already were.

Now wavailable on Netflix