UglyDolls (2019) - Movie Review

You know it’s a bad start when “This was originally going to be a Robert Rodriguez kids film” seems like a best-case scenario. The fabled one-man film crew may not have the best track record when it comes to family films, but when put next to director Kelly Asbury, whose work varies from ‘decent compared to what came before’ with Smurfs: The Lost Village, and outright atrocious with Gnomeo & Juliet, at least he had the first two Spy Kids films under his belt. But then again, I doubt that anyone would be able to salvage this thing, because the list of problems here is hefty.

This film’s budget was likely funnelled into two things: The cast list and the animation. Featuring the illustrious talents of Kelly Clarkson and Blake Shelton (in a film that kinda-sorta mocks reality TV standards), Nick Jonas in a role with more than one scene of dialogue lest he pull a Jumanji, and friggin’ Pitbull?! Between making for the worst part of Men In Black 3 with his soundtrack contribution, and putting a song towards last year’s embarrassment Gotti, making him a part of the main cast only serves to show that no matter how dreary modern pop music is, at least it isn’t his brand of vividly obnoxious trend-chasing.

As for the animation, that quip about the budget only seems to apply to the quality of the felt on the titular UglyDolls, which is legitimately good and could stand up to the likes of Pixar/Disney in terms of fabric fidelity. That’s where the positive comparisons end, though, as literally everything else looks like something I would scroll past while browsing NetFlix. It really says something when the population of Perfection are supposed to look like plastic, and even that doesn’t look right.

Then there’s the music, as this is regrettably a musical by nature, and man, is it lifeless. Having singers-first in the cast list helps somewhat with the delivery, and credit to Janelle Monae and Clarkson for managing the acting-singing dichotomy better than most, but the songs themselves are dreadful. It all sticks to the single theme of “we’re ugly but we deserve to be happy”, brought forward with tacky instrumentation that just sounds like Top 40 white noise, and lyrics that could not be more basic if they tried, and believe me, they try hard.

I’d be laughing at the utter dumpster fire on display here, if it weren’t for how badly these filmmakers want that reaction. This checks off a lot of points when it comes to the absolute worst way to write comedy, especially for a kid’s film (I’d say family film, but… yeah, if only this film’s reach was that wide). Pointing out the staleness of the story in hopes that admitting to laziness makes it excusable? Check. Overexplaining the joke? Check. Repeating the same joke when it wasn’t even funny in the first place? Check. Punchlines that don’t even register as jokes? Big check. It’s painful, make no mistake, but it’s the weird kind of painful where it somehow falls into the background compared to… well, everything else wrong with this thing.

And then there’s the story, or what can barely be considered a story, given the Emoji Movie levels of theft from other, better films. I mean, right down to the fact that the main villain in Jonas’ Lou is basically the ‘ideal boyfriend’ gag from Inside Out turned into an extended role. We’ve got the ‘be yourself’ motif that is in basically every family film nowadays, we’ve got the furnace scene from Toy Story 3 (with added eugenics subtext, because this film thinks it deserves that level of murk), and the musical elements feel like the made-for-screens rip-off of Dreamworks’ Trolls.

That amount of unoriginality could still have worked, if there was something genuine or poignant or even watchable being added to it. The closest we get to that is the literal ending of the film, which in a single image sells the point behind the UglyDolls toys better than the nearly-90-minutes preceding it. For the sake of easing my own headache, I’ll stop railing against this film any longer for its lack of originality. Mainly, because that’s not even the worst part of this mess.

That comes with how the interpretation of ‘be yourself’ comes across like the UglyDolls are still expecting to go along with the rules set by Perfection… but they can do it their own way. It basically advises to, rather than marching to the beat of your own drum, march to what everyone else is moving to but do it with a silly walk. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a bit of an outcast for most of my life, or maybe it’s just because I’ve been reading a lot of Doom Patrol recently, but to actual hell with the idea that this is what self-empowerment and ‘being yourself’ looks like.

Even with all of that said, I still feel like I haven’t even chipped the iceberg that is how much I really dislike this thing-I’m-supposed-to-call-a-movie. The production values are misguided, the writing is abysmal, and even with how derivative this is across the boards, I can’t even give it the credit that it had good intentions at its heart. In a sea of family films all about the importance of being true to one’s self (which, despite the overplay, will always be important for children to hear early on), this still manages to stand out for all the wrong reasons. And here I was, thinking that there weren’t enough truly bad movies this year.