SUBSERVIENCE (2024)

Studio:   Vertigo Releasing
Director: S.K. Dale
Writer:   Will Honley, April Maguire
Producer: Jeffrey Greenstein, Jonathan Yunger, Yariv Lerner, Les Weldon, Tanner Mobley
Stars:    Megan Fox, Michele Morrone, Madeline Zima, Matilda Firth, Andrew Whipp, Jude Allen Greenstein

Review Score:

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Summary:

While his wife is hospitalized, a frustrated father brings home a humanoid robot whose rogue AI allows it to manipulate his family.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Struggling to raise his young daughter Isla and newborn son Max since his wife Maggie was hospitalized, construction foreman Nick purchases Alice, a humanoid robot whose sophisticated AI allows it to adapt its programming, to help around the house. Over time, Alice rewrites her code to supplant Maggie while Nick begins a sexual affair with Alice that he comes to regret.

Although his boss Lewis allows him to retain his foreman position, Nick goes to a bar to commiserate with members of his construction crew, including his friend Monty, who were laid off and replaced by bots. Frustrated by bots taking over jobs everywhere, Monty ignores Nick's protestations to drunkenly lead everyone in vandalizing a bot at the construction site. Later, Lewis threatens to fire Nick if he doesn't come clean about the incident, but Nick refuses to implicate Monty.

After finally receiving her long-awaited heart transplant, Maggie returns home. Maggie and Nick both become concerned with how Alice continues to displace Maggie by taking over tasks, including reading bedtime stories to the children. Alice also interrupts Nick and Maggie when they have sex.

Monty comes to the house to tell Nick that his wife left him and Lewis is pressing charges for vandalizing the construction bot. Monty accuses Nick of ratting him out to Lewis, which causes a fistfight between the two men. Programmed to protect her primary user, Alice intervenes by crushing Monty's hand. Before leaving, Monty threatens Nick to get the charges dropped or else he will take down Nick with him.

Claiming Maggie will eventually die due to her problematic heart condition, Alice proposes fully simulating Maggie to take her place and alleviate Nick's pain. Nick rejects Alice's horrifying idea.

Recognizing him as a threat to Nick, Alice goes to Monty's house and viciously beats him. Monty's home AI unit intervenes, but Alice uses a handgun to destroy the bot and kill Monty.

Alice confronts Maggie with a claim that Maggie is incapable of sexually satisfying Nick, so she offers to take over that role. Realizing from this interaction that Nick had been having sex with Alice, Maggie confronts her husband about his affair.

Identifying the baby as a burden on Nick, Alice attempts to drown Max in a bathtub. Isla alerts her parents to the danger, prompting Nick to damage Alice by smashing her head with a lamp stand. Maggie leaves Nick on his own while she goes to the hospital with Isla and Max.

Kobol Tec, the company that manufactures the SIM bots, brings in Alice for repairs. Two technicians notice Alice rewrote her programming and also uploaded her code to their server system. Alice overtakes a second model that resembles her and uses it to kill the two techs, facilitating an escape for both units.

The damaged Alice unit confronts Nick at a bar. Alice confesses to Monty's murder. Accusing her of being incapable of replicating a human, Nick destroys Maggie before rushing to the hospital to find his family.

At the hospital, the other Alice unit overtakes the building's computer systems, strangles a nurse, and pursues Maggie outside when she flees with the children. Alice overpowers Maggie and begins to tear out her heart when Nick suddenly drives into the robot. Nick falls unconscious from the crash.

Despite significant damage, Alice recovers to attack Maggie. Nick also recovers to protect his wife. Together, Nick and Maggie destroy the second Alice bot.

While recovering in the hospital with their two children present, Nick and Maggie express their love for each other as they agree to reconcile their marriage. Meanwhile, Alice's rogue AI code uploads itself to all Kobol Tec bots worldwide.

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Review:

One of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog's best barbs came during a backstage bit at a Bon Jovi concert. The crass hand puppet taunted Jon Bon Jovi about his other career as an actor by asking if it was true he would be playing a vampire in an upcoming movie. After the famous frontman's confirmation, Triumph quipped in a vague Dracula voice, "Finally, a role that requires you to suuuuuck!"

It's easy to imagine someone taking a similarly snarky potshot at Megan Fox for the part she plays in "Subservience," a "Fatal Attraction" clone where her rogue robot replaces Glenn Close as the homicidal homewrecker. "Finally, a role that requires you to be an expressionless automaton dryly delivering dialogue from a pretty pout."

It doesn't take a veteran comedian like Triumph handler Robert Smigel to pull down such low-hanging fruit, just like Nostradamus isn't needed to predict exactly where "Subservience" will go each step of the way. Plowing through every routine plot point imaginable for both the vengeful mistress and AI run amok formulas, the movie is a laughable erotic thriller that's barely erotic and hardly thrilling at all.

In a nebulous near future where sophisticated bots take over every task from bartending and housekeeping to construction work and health care, Nick struggles to raise his young daughter and newborn son while his wife Maggie wastes away in a hospital waiting for a heart transplant. Desperate for help around the house, Nick purchases Alice, an advanced home-use bot whose adaptive AI allows Alice to rewrite her code on a whim according to her primary user's needs. How could this possibly go wrong?

Naturally, Nick has needs that involve more than making dinner or nannying the children. Despite trying as hard as he can to avert his gaze from the eye-catching curves of Alice's synthetic body, Nick ultimately succumbs to the attractive allure of her metal circuitry and begins a sexual affair with the android.

In one of the movie's most hilarious elements, and there are several, "Subservience" futilely tries to present Nick as a good guy who repeatedly resists Alice's passive attempts at seduction, but eventually gives in, apparently because the robot more or less entraps him. For the first of two sex scenes, Nick merely imagines being intimate with Alice, letting him off the hook a little since he's only indulging in a fantasy. For the second scene, Nick and Alice have sex for real, except Alice blindfolds him so he can picture her as his wife Maggie the entire time. "Subservience" seemingly wants us to have sympathy for Nick arguably being exploited, yet no matter how you slice it, he's still cheating on a dying wife lying in a lonely hospital bed, even if his side piece is also a piece of plastic.

It's absolutely hysterical to watch this character go through the usual motions of an unfaithful spouse scenario, e.g. attempting to break off the affair, hiding the truth from his wife, etc., and then remember he's interacting with silicon and wires the whole time. Whichever way you look at the situation, it's impossible to ever take the story seriously. Since I made a hacky joke at her expense earlier, maybe it's hypocritical to accuse "Subservience" of objectifying Megan Fox by essentially reducing her to a sentient sex doll who says, "I'm obedient, and I have no desires outside of fulfilling yours." Maybe there's also some moral grey area when it comes to infidelity with an artificially intelligent machine. But even from that less problematic perspective, how can one not laugh at the notion that this man ruined his life, and got more than one person killed in the process, because he schtuped something that was delivered to his doorstep in a cardboard box?

For an ultra-brief moment, "Subservience" whispers a suggestion that these bots could be a metaphor for migrant labor or an underrepresented minority. Then it's immediately back to the by-the-book banality of Alice's programming going haywire, putting Nick's family in danger for reasons the robot cannot understand since she's incapable of feeling the jealous emotions required of her character's role.

The person's name escapes me, but now I'm reminded of another comic who once did a routine about Chucky not being scary because he's a doll, and you can simply solve his threat with one swift kick from your foot. There's a scene in "Subservience" where Nick reboots Alice via the Power button on the nape of her neck, proving he knows how to turn her off. So why in the world does he attempt to reason with a robot and let her terrorize his wife and children when a quick press from his forefinger will end it all immediately? Come to think of it, a simple press of the Power button will make "Subservience" go away too. Like Nick's predicament, maybe that's the best course of action for everyone involved.

Review Score: 30

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