"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.