"Subservience" Review

 When I become Emperor of the Universe there's gonna be some changes. (OK, LOTS of changes.) One of the first tranche of edicts will be that any plastic surgeon who works on any famous woman who is by all objective standards in the top tier of beauty because they think they can improve on their natural genetics which were more than fine to start with will be condemned repairing cleft palettes and other deformities on poor Third World children for minimum wage. 

The reason for this opening outburst is because some butchers have been allowing Megan Fox to alter herself to please her dirtbag boyfriend, Machine Gun Kelly, making her look like an absolute bimbo/porn star and I don't mean in a good way. This is the same Megan Fox of whom I coined one of my classic retorts in response to the missus saying she doesn't look very smart: "Sometimes you're not looking for a conversation." (Or as Tina Fey said in response to an interviewer calling her a "thinking man's sex symbol" - "Even thinking men want to f*ck Megan Fox." I love Tina.) She was always riding the line of self-parody, but when she's gone from this...

...to this...

 

 ...for the disposable new sci-fi erotic thriller (there's a genre-filing nightmare) Subservience, it was impossible for me to stop being distracted by her duck-lipped Instahoe face. What needed improving?!? Jeez, that body has THREE kids aged 8-12 years old on it. (That they're all looking to be raised a mess is a separate matter.)

"Ummmm, Dirk, is this a movie review or a rant against women doing what they want with their bodies?" you may be saying? BOTH!!! Pop Quiz, Hotshots - Name a top shelf beauty whose looks were IMPROVED by plastic surgery? Pamela Anderson was in Playboy and on Home Improvement with her original breasts. Did making them into cartoonish sweater blimps improve them for anyone but Tommy Lee or Kid Rock?

OK, rant over, on to the movie....Subservience is the story of Nick (a shockingly uncharismatic Italian Michele Morrone), a construction worker whose wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) appears to die in the opening scene. (Ooooh, it's a Disney movie!) With two young kids to raise, Nick goes to the mall and buys himself a helper in the form of Alice (Megan Fox) to help around the house.

That this Alice looks like Megan Fox and not The Brady Bunch's Ann B. Davis is the whole hook of the movie and it's not a spoiler to say he eventually plugs himself into her charging port because of course these robots have that feature. Oh, and Maggie isn't dead, she's just waiting for a heart transplant at the hospital so she's not around to see how Alice is keeping hubs occupied. (To be fair, he does feel guilty about the docking maneuver he allowed her to force him into with her robot super strength and sure, bro, go with that story when the wife figures it out.)

Meanwhile at work, the owners of the building project decide to lay off all the meatbag workers in favor of robots because why not have a strong workforce that never gets hurt or will go on strike. Nick is kept on because of his needing his health insurance for Maggie's surgery and insurance insisting on a human supervisor because if robots can be entrusted with child care, they definitely need to be babysat doing construction or something. Of course his former coworkers aren't too happy about the machines and Nick's pal Monty (Andrew Whipp) coerces him into aiding in some drunken vandalism.

But that's not all, because Nick feels Alice is missing the emotional resonance of Casablanca because she has the plots of every movie in her databanks, he follows her instructions to reboot her so she'd be less knowledgeable and of course this also turns off her restrictions against harming people because SkyNet ain't gonna arise by itself or something.

In the hands of a competent writer, the themes Subservience grazes past could've been woven into something more than the nothing this movie is. Killer robots on the loose trying to be human is a pulpy premise, but the light years between twaddle like this and Blade Runner are immeasurable. The thin script and flat performances and leaps over plot convenience Subservience requires are simply not worth the effort.

And for crying out loud, do not see this because you've heard about "Megan Fox's first nude scene!" You see a side view of her butt. Big deal. This isn't Emma Stone in Poor Things where she went from one nipple in The Favourite to full monty yikes sex scenes.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"Trap" Review

 So M. Night Shyamalan has photos of the big bosses of Hollyweird committing heinous felonies (or at least really skeevy morally depraved stuff) because why else would he be allowed to make a movie of a screenplay as intrinsically terrible as the one for Trap, which at this writing has a 6.1 average score on IMDB which also indicts the stupidity of audiences while also explaining a lot of why so many politicians remain in office?

Trap stars Josh Harnett as Cooper, a fireman who's also an awesome girl dad who is taking his tween daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see her fave pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan - one guess as to who her dad is). But as we know going in from the trailer, he's also the Butcher, an unimaginatively-named serial killer whose signature move is hacking up his bodies like a, you know, a crazy person.

But the cops somehow know he's going to be at the concert and have set a trap (roll credits!) for him by deploying a literal army of black-clad SWAT officers toting assault rifles as well as tons of regular dress cops who cover every entrance and exit. There is enough man and firepower present to knock over a moderate-sized country, so there's no way the Butcher can escape and the concert goers won't even seem to notice the armed prison vibe during the show.

Having entered Fort Hockey Arena despite the show of force, Cooper asks a super helpful merch booth worker, Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), what all the troops are for and Jamie tells Cooper that they're there to catch the Butcher. (This is also in the trailer.) How will our plucky serial killer possibly escape?

 Well, as the great Ryan George Pitch Meeting series always says, it'll be super easy, barely an inconvenience because at every step of the way, Cooper will be able to hear the next important piece of information, either by always being right there when someone says it or conveniently listening in on a purloined walkie talkie when the FBI profiler, Dr. Grant (Hayley Mills, presumably hired because she started in The Parent Trap and Shyamalan has even less originality that we thought), broadcasts Basil Exposition infodumps.

There is so much stupid going on with Trap that it's hard to know where to start cataloging the transgressions, but the alarm bells began going off within minutes as detail after detail elicited annoyed, "That would never happen," comments from me (ahhhh, the benefits of home theater, where you can stop to heckle a movie without annoying strangers) and raising the question whether MNS ever been to a concert in his life? Does he know how anything works in reality?

During the show a guest performer emerges from the floor of the arena. The floor in the aisle opens up and a staircase emerges with the guest standing atop it before descending down to walk the floor towards the stage. There are no barricades around this chasm so anyone not paying attention could fall down into it. Many pop shows have runways that thrust out into the crowd so any guest would emerge from the stage surrounded by barricades. MNS only stages it this way because Cooper sees it as a possible escape route.

At another point Cooper manages to access an area where SWAT troops are getting a briefing about their mission so he can conveniently hear what they know about him. The concert is going on and the place is staked out. Wouldn't this briefing have been done beforehand?

Then there is a B-plot about Riley having issues with mean girls at school and Cooper repeatedly running into one of their mothers in the concourse. Did I mention that Riley keeps leaving the concert of her favorite artist to find her dad running all over? That happens when everyone knows that the only time people leave their seats is to hit the bathroom during the mid-show part of the set when the artist wants to play something off the new album or a boring ballad. NOTHING IS REAL!!!

And hoo boy there is the whole Jamie the merch guy situation where he enables so much by doing things that WOULD NEVER HAPPEN like leave his booth to take Cooper to get a t-shirt from the back area. He just gives it to him as if every item of merch isn't counted out and in to determine how much money should be in the til and to cut the venue their percentage. And he doesn't even take the rest of the box to sell at the booth! (He does get a good mid-credits callback moment.)

When Cooper's escape plan leads to him getting backstage after the most convenient pretense ever to get Riley involved with the show, the way he gets Raven to facilitate their escape hammered the OH, COME THE F*CK ON!!! meter so hard the needle bent 45 degrees. Does this big star not have an entourage, handlers, beggars and hangers-on? Why is her dressing room so sparsely done up? (Seriously, I have been in nicer green rooms as a nobody musician than this space.) How does no one notice she's taking off with some guy and his kid without comment?!?!?

Now I will admit that once he gets out of the arena with Raven, my level of interest ticked up from enraged apathy to vague curiosity whether the back half of the movie could be better? It's not and frankly indulges in new flavors of stupid leading to a twist even I saw coming and a final twist which again requires everyone to be moronic to unbelievable levels.

 Aspiring screenwriters are constantly lectured about making sure their screenplays follow basic logic, so it must be super appalling to see MNS get away with attracting a reported $30M budget for a script that with get a neophyte in a night school class advised to pursue a career in the food service or housekeeping industries. Cooper is supposed to be this brilliant psychopath, but he has every step of his dodging capture literally handed to him. He's as if Tugg Speedman wanted to make The Silence of the Lambs as his Simple Jack character.

The entire chain of events depicted would unravel if everything doesn't go totally according to the hackneyed way MNS types them out. If they didn't have all the cops in plain sight, Cooper would have suspected nothing. What kind of sting operation has massive shows of police force? Without the cops, he doesn't ask Jamie the Very Talkative Merch Dude Who Can't Keep A Secret what's going on, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. If Raven's people say, "Hey, where is she going with that guy?" then he's caught. It's maddening.

Hartnett has been having a bit of a moment lately due to his co-starring role in last year's Oppenheimer (that was the movie about making the atomic bomb, not the one about Barbie in the "Barbenheimer" double-feature) and while he tries his best with the garbage MNS typed up, his efforts are wasted. I never cared for him during his teen idol days in the late-20th/early-21st Centuries where I felt his shtick was acting like a puppy dog with caterpillar eyebrows. But now in his mid-40s, his face has filled out and he looks like Kyle Chandler's brother. (Paging casting directors!) Someone get him a good script, please.

As for the other major purpose of this dumb movie, launching Daddy's little girl's pop and acting career, Saleka Shyamalan is adequate to the task. She's perfectly fine playing a pop singer and her music is as generically bland as most of what passes for "music" these days on the Spotify charts. In the one restrained directorial choice Daddy S makes, he shoots the numerous concert segments from the point of view of Riley's seat in the arena, not up close like a concert video. So the view is filled with idiots filming on their phones and she's only really seen on the video screens.

Shyamalan has had so many career highs and lows due to his own poor choices that one could get whiplash. After a killer opening run of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village followed by a decade of Razzie Awards bait before coming back with The Visit and Split, only to piss that comeback away with Glass (seriously, screw you, Night, for that ending!) and seemingly alternative between OK and bad movies (according to my missus who watches more of them than I do), he's firmly back in the Suck Zone with Trap. Don't let him trap you into wasting 100 minutes of your life on such dumb dreck. Go watch one of his early movies instead.

Score: 2/10. Skip it.