Subservience

by Mike McGranaghan

I wanted to like Subservience. I really, really did. The entertainment business has utterly failed Megan Fox, who gave an awesomely wicked performance in Jennifer’s Body and has demonstrated solid comedic chops in This Is 40 and on TV’s New Girl. She deserves material better than the C-grade crap she constantly gets stuck in. But here the actress is once again mired in that crap, forced into another one-dimensional “hot girl” role that offers zero opportunity to prove her talents.

When his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) is hospitalized while waiting for a heart transplant, Nick (Michele Morrone) decides to get a lifelike AI-powered android to help with household chores, including taking care of their kids. He has plenty of options to choose from, but his young daughter insists on “Alice” (Fox), a sultry looking fembot programmed to always act in her owner’s best interests.

AI is a scary thing, and there are all sorts of ways a thriller could go in exploring its potential negative implications. Subservience opts to go in the dumbest, most obvious direction imaginable. If you guessed that Nick wants to screw Alice, you’re right on the money. She recognizes that getting laid will benefit him since he’s so stressed out, making her a willing participant. In one sequence, they get it on in the bathroom, with him sitting on the toilet and her straddling him. The film’s “excitement” is supposed to come from the Fatal Attraction-type suggestion that Alice eventually wants to get rid of Maggie so she can have Nick all to herself.

Wedged into that nonsense is a boring, completely useless subplot involving Nick being forced to oversee the group of androids brought in to replace his human coworkers at a construction site. Who cares about his professional problems when a sex-crazed robot wants to slay his entire family? Then again, Nick is such a scumbag – cheating on his wife while she’s in the hospital and all – that he deserves every ounce of misery he receives. I can’t remember the last time a movie had me so actively rooting against the protagonist.

It's laughable when Alice suddenly turns into the Terminator at the end. She’s supposed to be a domestic android, yet she can throw people through walls and push automobiles out of her way. Considerably less funny is the plot’s use of the tasteless gimmick of putting a baby’s life in jeopardy for one sequence. What could be more entertaining than imagining an infant getting burned to death in a tub full of scalding hot water? When movies do stuff like this, you know the people who made them are desperate and devoid of inspiration. Of course, Subservience’s approximately six endings suggest the exact same thing.

I’m not saying Megan Fox is on the level of Meryl Streep or Viola Davis. When given decent material, though, she’s capable of rising to the occasion. Junk like this, Expend4bles, and Midnight in the Switchgrass are not what her career needs. Surely there’s another Judd Apatow or Diablo Cody out there who can give this woman a half-decent screenplay to act in. At least, I hope there is, if only so she won’t have to toil through a picture as irritating as Subservience ever again.

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