Uglies is a 2024 Netflix science-fiction film directed by McG, based on Scott Westerfeld's 2005 young-adult novel, and it currently sits at a richly deserved 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. It stars Joey King as Tally Youngblood, alongside Keith Powers, Chase Stokes, Brianne Tju, and Laverne Cox. The premise: in a dystopian future, everyone is required to undergo cosmetic surgery at sixteen to become "Pretty," and Tally begins to suspect that the beautiful, carefree life on offer might come at a hidden cost. I have watched genuinely bad films for this channel, but this one made a real push for the bottom of the pile, so let me explain, at length, exactly how.

The first and most fundamental problem is timing. This is a Hunger Games-style YA dystopia that arrived roughly a decade after that entire genre had been thoroughly mined, exhausted, and abandoned. The director openly described it as his "answer to Hunger Games," a strange thing to announce when the question stopped being asked years ago. Critics have also pointed out how heavily it borrows from the 1976 film Logan's Run, and the comparison is fair. Divergent and The Maze Runner already ran this exact race, and at least they had the decency to show up while the audience was still in the stadium.

The second problem is more damning, because it undercuts the film's entire concept. The central idea is that surgery transforms ordinary "ugly" people into radically, unrecognisably beautiful "pretties." Yet the film never actually shows this transformation. The "Pretty" versions of the characters are simply the same actors with what looks like a smoothing social-media filter applied over their faces. Tally's big "Pretty" reveal is essentially Joey King looking like a slightly blonder version of herself. For a story built entirely on the horror and allure of extreme physical alteration, the film is incapable of depicting any alteration at all. Worse, in a world supposedly divided into the beautiful and the hideous, the only visible "flaw" anyone has is a small scar on the hand. Nobody is overweight, nobody is disabled, nobody is anything other than a conventionally attractive young actor. It's a film about beauty standards that quietly enforces the exact standard it pretends to critique.

The performances do it no favours. The entire cast struggles, but the lead is the biggest issue. Joey King, who not only stars but executive produced the film and spent over a decade shepherding it to the screen as a passion project, delivers one of the weakest and least charismatic lead turns I've seen in some time. That the person most personally invested in this material anchors it so unconvincingly is genuinely deflating. The dialogue offers no lifeline either; the film's idea of a memorable line is a character introducing himself with a flat "Yup, I'm David."