Joey King Remains Hollywood’s Stream Queen

Joey King is Hollywood’s reigning Stream Queen, thanks to starring roles in Hulu’s The Act and The Princess, and Netflix’s The Kissing Booth trilogy and A Family Affair. She seems destined to retain that title with Uglies, premiering Sept. 13, a Netflix adaptation of Scott Westerfield’s 2005 novel about a dystopian society that’s achieved peace and harmony through cosmetic surgery.

To say that it’s a fourth-generation knock-off of myriad similar YA sagas that have come before it would be an understatement, but thanks to King’s strong lead performance, it will likely be well received by tween audiences who’ve yet to become numb to these clichés.

In the future, the Earth has fallen apart due to its overreliance on fossil fuels, resulting in war, famine, and all the other terrible things that beget a gray, scary post-apocalyptic wasteland. Fortunately, scientists developed a magic orchid that serves as a renewable power source for the planet. As for what to do about humanity’s penchant for hating, fighting, and discriminating against each other, these geniuses came up with “The Transformation,” a life-altering procedure that, on kids’ 16th birthday, transforms them into physically perfect specimens.

With everyone looking like a model, there’s apparently no need for conflict; every day and night is spent partying in a glittering metropolis where confetti rains down, fireworks light up the sky, and shiny white smiles abound.

These folks are called the “Pretties,” and those still waiting to be reborn are known as “Uglies” and reside in gray dormitories where they think of nothing but improving their looks. This is true of Tally Youngblood (King) and Peris (Chase Stokes), best friends with nicknames—she’s Squint, he’s Nose—based on the horrible features they most want to change.

Tally and Peris clearly love each other but are currently platonic, and on the eve of Peris’ birthday and departure, he promises to meet Tally on a bridge in one month to tell her all about his fantastic new life. Alas, when that day comes, Peris doesn’t show, compelling Tally to sneak into the Pretties’ city. There, she discovers that Peris is now a plastic-looking adonis who’s barely interested in her and, gasp, has gotten rid of the hand scar that was identical to her own and represented their bond.

Once detected as an interloper, Tally must use a “bungee jacket” to escape her airship pursuers. Back at the bridge, she’s saved from capture by Shay (Brianne Tju), a classmate who conveniently happens to be at this random spot at this precise post-curfew moment. Together, they zoom away on Shay’s zippy hoverboard, after which they discover that they’re both rebellious tricksters.

“How are we not already friends?” exclaims Shay after approximately two seconds in Tally’s company. The answer is that the film is a contrived paint-by-numbers adventure and needs Tally to have a new pal with ties to The Smoke, a rebel outfit whose mysterious leader David (Keith Powers) is whispered about in school. Shay teaches Tally how to ride her hoverboard so she can later use it in chases and on missions, and also suggests that maybe she’s not interested in the Procedure because she likes herself.

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On the day of Tally’s makeover, she’s summoned to the office of Dr. Cable (Laverne Cox), who explains that the only way Tally will get the Procedure is if she first tracks down Shay and the rest of her Smoke compatriots, who are allegedly devising a weapon to destroy the city.

Director McG (Charlie’s Angels, Terminator Salvation) knows his way around big, fanciful sci-fi material, and Uglies is certainly never sluggish. It is, however, derivative beyond belief, underscoring that its target demographic appears to be pre-teens who haven’t repeatedly watched The Hunger Games, Divergent, and the rest of their ilk.

During her time with David and Shay, Tally learns that the Procedure actually makes you a mindless, emotionless blank (“They erase who you are!”), proves really good at shooting a crossbow, and decides that she doesn’t want gold eyes and sculpted features like her mom. Instead, she wants to be a woodlands rebel who lives with people in communal harmony (there’s no money, they just barter) and eats organic food grown right around their tents and hobbit-like dwellings, because that’s the polar opposite of Dr. Cabal’s urban wonderland and the film has to operate in binary terms.

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Aside from its message that beauty is all about what’s on the inside, Uglies’ only lesson is that screen culture is destructive and active physical work is good. Otherwise, it’s a bunch of standard-issue us-vs.-them skirmishes involving love-triangled Tally, David, and Peris, who’s turned by Dr. Cabal into a super-Pretty in Tron-esque armor. Fights and hoverboard flights are part and parcel of this ho-hum affair, whose conclusion turns out to be a cliffhanger that sets the table for an ensuing sequel. Whether that’s in the cards, however, depends on if kids are still interested in the same tired YA stuff, since there’s no way any adult will find it more than unoriginal and wearisome.

King is as charming as usual, exhibiting a feistiness that goes hand in hand with her sensitivity and earnestness. As with the rest of the Uglies revolutionaries, though, she’s too attractive to qualify as undesirable, much less be mocked by others as repulsive. Uglies is a paper-thin parable about the corrosiveness of vanity and the virtue of tolerance and self-acceptance, following a playbook that at this point is tattered beyond repair. The irony is that there’s not much lurking beneath its own shiny surface except platitudes fit solely for those who’ve yet to reach puberty.