By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
If you were randomly scrolling through any streaming service while blindfolded and pushed play after scrolling for 30 seconds, there’s a good chance you just pressed play on a movie about a helpful AI that goes bad. With hundreds of movies out there following this basic plot, Netflix’s latest streaming hit, Subservience, struggles to stand out. It does, thanks to the performance of Megan Fox.
That’s right, I just praised Megan Fox for her acting. Fox reteamed with the director of the surprisingly good thriller Til Death for the film, and I mean this as a compliment, but she plays a tremendous emotionless robot.
Megan Fox Was Born To Play An Evil Robot
From the moment you hit play on Subservience, you know where it’s going, and the first half has no twists on the classic formula we’ve grown to expect. Michele Morrone, from the Netflix erotic thriller 365 series, is Nick, a husband and father trying to keep the family together while his wife, Maggie, played by Madelina Zima (who played Grace, the youngest Sheffield on The Nanny, in case you needed to feel old today) is in the hospital for heart surgery. Fox plays “Alice,” an advanced Sim, the new android taking over the workforce as a nanny/housemaid to help while the family recovers.
If you guessed that Alice slowly becomes more and more sinister, congratulations, you’ve seen at least one other movie before. In this case, she’s trying to replace Maggie.
If the movie had stuck with the sequence of “accidents” around the house, it could have been more interesting, but instead, Subservience tries to do a little too much. There’s a subplot about Nick’s business dealing with upset workers over the introduction of Sims, a genuinely bizarre scene with Alice seducing Nick using Maggie’s voice, and a wild tease for more potential movies that undercuts all the tense moments of a super-strong robotic killer loose inside the couple’s house.
Megan Fox Is Great, But The Rest Of The Movie…
Though it’s Megan Fox playing the evil AI, Michele Morrone delivers the most lifeless performance in Subservience. Oddly, it sort of works because Nick isn’t supposed to be a great guy, at least, I don’t think he is. With multiple erotic thrillers under this belt, Morrone is becoming the Netflix equivalent of Michael Douglas, and when he shows up in anything, you know he’s playing a scumbag.
With a different male lead and a tighter focus on the parts of the movie that truly work, Subservience could have been a future cult hit, but as it stands, it’s a decent streaming movie for when there’s nothing else left to watch. On Rotten Tomatoes, the critics haven’t been kind; out of 30 reviews at the time of this writing, it’s at 50 percent rotten, and the fan rating, from over 250 reviews, isn’t much better, at 53 percent. And yet, it’s also the number one movie on Netflix in the United States in its debut weekend on the service.
Subservience Is 30 Years Too Late
If Subservience was an HBO release in 1994, it would be a hit. Unfortunately, it’s 2024, and outside of a few legitimately creepy moments, all thanks to Megan Fox deciding to absolutely go for it as a killer robot, it’s completely forgettable today.
SUBSERVIENCE REVIEW SCORE
If you really want to see another evil AI movie before M3GAN 2.0 comes out, you do worse. If nothing else, Fox seems to be embracing her new career arc as a streaming movie villain. She’s willing to take some risks, but maybe next time, she’ll have a more exciting script.
2024-12-08 05:43:57
