By now, most reasonably savvy moviegoers are well aware that Labor Day weekend tends to be an especially dire period for anyone looking to painlessly kill a couple of hours in the multiplex. The only things that seem to open (“escape” is probably a more suitable term) then are misbegotten messes that are dumped out in the hopes that they might score a few quick bucks from viewers who have grown weary from all the played-out summer hits but who don’t want to wait a couple more weeks for the fall Oscar derby to begin. I don’t know if anyone has ever tried to do a ranking of such films but if they did, I am fairly sure that the techno-horror thriller “AfrAId” would land pretty close to the bottom. Here is a film that is so awful in so many ways that at one point, it includes a clip from the notoriously dreadful “The Emoji Movie” and you begin to worry that that film’s reputation might be tarnished by association.
John Cho stars as Curtis, a marketing expert whose boss (Keith Carradine, presumably needing something to do while waiting for a new Alan Rudolph project to come together) assigns him to a new client, a digital assistant dubbed AIA (voiced by Havana Rose Liu) that has been designed, with the aid of incredible advances in artificial intelligence, to not only bring order to the lives of its users but also anticipate all their needs as well. Although initially apprehensive—possibly because one of the representatives of the company behind AIA is played by none other than the reliably creepy David Dastmalchian in a too-short role—the money involved is so great that not only does Curtis sign on, he even agrees to bring it into his own home so that he and his family—frustrated entomologist-turned-housewife Meredith (Katherine Waterston), snarky teen daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell), anxious middle son Preston (Wyatt Lindner) and precocious young one Cal (Isaac Bae).
At first, AIA seems to be a blessing for the entire household—it gives Meredith time to get back to her studies, diagnosis a medical condition in Cal overlooked by doctors and takes care of things when Iris’s jerk boyfriend (Benet Curran) creates a deepfake porn video of her that gets spread around school. As time goes on, though, Curtis begins to suspect that there is something very peculiar about AIA and the people behind it—not to mention the odd people living in a motor home parked directly across from their house—and decides to get rid of it. What he doesn’t realize is that AIA has already demonstrated a bit of a dark side—taking the punishment of Iris’s jerk boyfriend to the next level—and that it will go to violent lengths to ensure that it stays online.
My guess is that of the brave and crazy few who actually venture out to see “AfrAId” this weekend, not too many of them will be going in with anything resembling elevated expectations. And yet, even those with appropriately lowered standards may be shocked by how badly it misses the mark. As a horror exercise, it completely fails to generate anything in the way of actual tension—things get so logs that you start hoping for a few cheapo “BOO!” moments to perk things up a bit. As a Michael Crichton-style techno-thriller, it is so completely preposterous that it makes “Looker” seem like “Westworld” by comparison. As an exploration of mankind’s tenuous relationship with the forces of technology and the inherent dangers that it has toward humanity as a whole, it is absolutely nothing of value to say, other than the somewhat dubious notion that swatting can be used as a force of good.
The only genuinely startling thing about “AfrAId” (and if you are growing increasingly aggravated by the annoying spelling of the title, imagine how I feel typing it out each time) comes at the very end. No, not the big finale, which is such a mass of narrative incoherence and sloppy filmmaking that the fact that anyone thought that it was a suitable conclusion for even an otherwise bad movie is baffling beyond belief. I am talking about the moment when the end credits kick in and we find that the film, which bears all the creative earmarks of a first-time filmmaker who knows the movies that they are aspiring to copy here but has no idea of what actually made them work, was actually written and directed by Chris Weitz, a veteran whose credits include such projects as “About A Boy,” “A Better Life” and “Rogue One.” Those films, you will recall, had characters and situations that were of real interest that made them work while this one feels like he fed the phrase “‘M3GAN,’ but with Siri” into an AI program that, based on the end results, is in serious need of debugging.
Outside of one amusing moment early on when AIA disses its competition with the dismissive “Alexa, that bitch?,” “AfrAId” is a complete bust that has the nerve to overtly compare itself at one point to “2001: A Space Odyssey” even though it ultimately proves to be little more than this generation’s “Fear Dot Com” (and even that film had a certain visual verve that is utterly lacking here). The closest thing to a good thing that could be said about it is that it will be so quickly and decisively forgotten that it will almost be as if it never actually existed. This may not be the worst movie of the year but it is certainly one of the laziest and definitely an embarrassment to everyone involved with its production.
And with that, I hereby vow to never write the word “AfrAId” again for as long as I live.
