It’s been 15 years since Megan Fox had the presumably weird expertise of reaching a profession apex and nadir abruptly. In 2009, she co-starred within the second-highest-grossing U.S. launch of the 12 months, and simply the largest of her profession, with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and some months later had her first actual non-love-interest lead in Jennifer’s Physique, a horror movie from acclaimed director Karyn Kusama and screenwriter Diablo Cody, and fairly handily the perfect film she’s ever made. However the press and the general public each bought blended up, and by some means Fox bought the quick finish of each films. The actually good one wasn’t acknowledged as such till years later – Jennifer’s Physique now has its appreciative cult – and by some means a serious story rising from the horrible Transformers sequel was that Fox bought bounced from its personal follow-up, whereas perhaps it ought to have been framed as a triumphant escape. One way or the other, something that went mistaken along with her films was her fault, and as a cartoonishly sizzling younger girl, she was merely reaping what she had sown along with her personal attention-seeking.
Like a number of younger girls pilloried by the media within the 2000s, Fox was ultimately reevaluated – although that hasn’t actually resulted in her reclaiming a serious film profession. Following her nice and horrible 2009, she kidded her personal bombshell picture in comedies like This Is 40 and Associates with Youngsters, and did a well-received stint on New Woman. She took a thankless live-action a part of these Ninja Turtle films produced by her Transformers director Michael Bay. And since that sequence dead-ended, she’s largely been turning up in direct-to-video-level programmers, maybe eager to make films on her phrases, slightly than toiling away to show herself in a franchise-dominated Hollywood.
A brilliant spot in Fox’s latest filmography is S.Ok. Dale’s Until Dying, through which she performs a spouse trapped in a lifeless marriage – figuratively after which actually, as her husband handcuffs himself to her, commits suicide, and leaves her to lug round his physique whereas combating off employed killers. It’s each ludicrous and completely scaled, a ghoulish gimmick and a hilariously overt metaphor for relationship baggage, calling upon the scrappiness past Fox’s sultry seems to be.
Now it seems to be as if Fox has discovered a inventive companion who understands her picture with out lowering it to a joke, as a result of she and Dale have made one other film collectively: the sci-fi thriller Subservience. Admittedly, this one sounds precisely like a joke, and never a very intelligent one: Fox performs a sexbot who menaces a cheerful household! However Alice, the robotic Fox performs right here, isn’t really a conduit for male pleasure – at the very least in a roundabout way or solely. She’s a home help, providing some further parenting assist to Nick (365 DNI stud Michele Morrone) whereas his spouse Maggie (Madeline Zima) has a chronic hospital keep, awaiting a coronary heart transplant. Nick’s skepticism – he’s seen automatons taking jobs in his office and has been pressured to grit his tooth and settle for it – is overridden by the reduction of getting assist round the home. Alice turns into so attuned to the ebb and stream of that reduction that she begins to override her personal programming, allegedly to position Nick’s well being and well-being above all.
There’s sharp commentary buried someplace right here about the best way the world caters to the wants of males, developing whole-ass super-robots simply to help with the essential competencies of labor and household, although the film is in the end too sympathetic towards Nick to have interaction in any actual satire. A minimum of its sense of understanding extends towards Nick and Maggie’s marriage, which isn’t written with the identical amused toxicity as the connection in Until Dying. There’s real love and want between husband and spouse, even with a possible sexbot lurking round.
That function ought to be a inventory one, and it doesn’t give Fox as a lot to do as Until Dying. As a complete, Subservience isn’t fairly pretty much as good as the sooner Dale/Fox image; it has much less ahead momentum, much less ingenuity within the building of its motion, and extra acquainted contours within the tech-gone-mad style. (I appear to recall one other Megan who went nuts on the household she was supposed to guard!) On the similar time, the film has enjoyable casting Fox within the function of a subservient robotic who ultimately provides herself to her “main consumer” for the larger good, winking on the approach Fox has so usually been obtained as a male fantasy made flesh, slightly than an precise one that occurs to be attractive.
That stress is explored with larger and thornier perceptiveness in Jennifer’s Physique, the place her mean-girl indifference is distorted into gender-specific monstrousness (boy-eating on one hand; bestie dismissiveness on the opposite) that blurs the road between dangerous pal and demonic possession. However Subservience additionally winks at Fox’s entire performing model. She nonetheless has the baby-voiced have an effect on of a pop star singing by way of her nostril and might summon pitiless seems to be of contempt, which makes her a simple goal for criticism – in addition to best casting for tart-tongued comedy, slasher horror, or, because it occurs, a sci-fi world the place robots reply with a sort of stiff-voiced depth. There’s a humorous scene the place a number of babysitting robots are thrown into straight-faced parenting-by-proxy battle at a playground, matter-of-factly stating the impolite ideas loads of dad and mom have in these conditions. Even when Subservience turns Alice right into a standard-issue homicide droid, Fox’s robotic moments have a clean-lined zest. She by some means seems to be having enjoyable with out breaking character.
A semi-diverting, straight-to-VOD killer-tech thriller isn’t going to vault Fox again onto the A-list. Even in the perfect of circumstances, it appears unlikely that her profession would have matched a few of the girls who began off in films across the similar time, like Emma Stone or Jennifer Lawrence. Fox appears at peace with that. In Dale’s films thus far, she will get to be a B-movie queen with the figuring out layer of somebody who has witnessed the larger absurdities of big-budget studio films – a physique price taking significantly.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a author dwelling in Brooklyn. He’s an everyday contributor to The A.V. Membership, Polygon, and The Week, amongst others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.