It’s been 15 years since Megan Fox had the perhaps strange experience of reaching her career peak and nadir at the same time. In 2009, he starred in the second highest-grossing US release of the year, and easily the biggest of his career, with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallenand a few months later he was the first real non-love-interest lead Jennifer’s bodyhorror film from the acclaimed director Karyn Kusama and screenwriter Diablo Cody, and pretty handily the best film they have ever made. But the press and the public both got mixed up, and somehow Fox got the end of the movie. That was so good it wasn’t recognized until years later – Jennifer’s body now has its appreciative cult – and somehow the main story out of the terrible Transformers This sequel Fox got bounced from his own follow-up, when maybe it should have been framed as a triumphant escape. Somehow, whatever goes wrong with her movie is her fault, and as a hot young lady, she only reaps what she sows by seeking attention for herself.
Like many young women who were bullied by the media in the 2000s, Fox eventually re-evaluated – although this did not lead to her achieving a major film career. After he was big and ugly 2009, he kidded his own bombshell image in comedy like This is 40 and Friends with Childrenand perform the accepted duties well New Girl. He took the thankless live-action part of the Ninja Turtle movie that he produced Transformers director Michael Bay. And since the series died, they’ve mostly been direct-to-video level programmers, perhaps wanting to make movies on their terms, rather than working hard to prove themselves in franchise-dominated Hollywood.
A bright spot in Fox’s latest filmography is SK Dale Until Deathin which he played a wife trapped in a dead marriage – figuratively and then literally, as her husband shackled himself to her, committed suicide, and left her to lug around his body while fighting dead hired killers. It’s both ludicrous and perfectly scaled, a ghoulish gimmick and a hilariously overt metaphor for the baggage of relationships, calling upon the scrappiness beyond Fox’s sultry appearance.
Now it seems that Fox has found a creative partner who understands his picture without reducing it to a joke, because he and Dale have made another film together: a sci-fi thriller. Devotion. Admittedly, this sounds exactly like a joke, and not particularly clever: Fox plays a sexbot that is a threat to a happy family! But Alice, the robot Fox plays here, is not a conduit for male pleasure — at least not directly or exclusively. She serves as a housekeeper, providing additional parental assistance to Nick (365 DAYS stud Michele Morrone) while his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) has a long hospital stay, waiting for a heart transplant. Nick’s skepticism – he had seen automatons take jobs at his workplace and was forced to grit his teeth and accept – was overridden by the relief of having help around the house. Alice is so attuned to the ebb and flow of relief that she begins to override her own programming, allegedly to put Nick’s health and well-being above all else.
There’s a clear commentary buried everywhere about the way the world caters to human needs, building super-ass robots all just to help with the basic competencies of work and family, even though the movie is ultimately sympathetic to Nick’s involvement in anything. real satire. At least that understanding extends to Nick and Maggie’s marriage, which isn’t written with the same toxicity as the relationship in Until Death. There is genuine love and desire between husband and wife, even with a potential sexbot lurking around.
The role should be stock, and not give Fox as much Until Death. Totally, Devotion not quite as good as the previous Dale/Fox picture; it has less forward momentum, less intelligence in the construction of action, and more familiar contours in the tech-is-mad genre. (I seem to remember another Megan who is a nut in the family she is supposed to protect!) At the same time, the film likes to cast Fox in the role of a subservient robot that finally offers itself to him “primary user” for the better, winking in the way Fox has often accepted as a male fantasy made flesh, instead of a real person who happens to be handsome.
The tension is explored with a larger and thornier perception Jennifer’s bodywhere her mean-girl indifference has been distorted into a gender-specific monstrosity (boy-eating on the one hand; bestie dismissiveness on the other) that blurs the line between bad friends and demonic possession. But Devotion also winks at Fox’s whole acting style. He still has the influence of the baby voice of a pop star who sings through his nose and can summon a look of contempt without mercy, which makes him an easy target for criticism – also an ideal casting for tart-tongue comedy, slasher horror, or, as it happens, the world of sci- fi where the robot responds with a type of noise intensity. There’s a funny scene where some babysitting robots are thrown into a parenting-by-proxy conflict on the playground, vividly expressing the thoughts of the unruly parents in the situation. Even when Devotion turns Alice into a standard-issue murder droid, the moment Fox’s robot has a clean spirit. He somehow seems to have fun without breaking character.
A semi-diverting, direct-to-VOD killer-tech thriller will not vault Fox back to the A-list. Even in the best of circumstances, it seems unlikely that her career will match that of some women who started in the movies at the same time, like Emma Stone or Jennifer Lawrence. Fox seems at peace with that. In Dale’s movies so far, he’s going to be a B-movie queen with the layers of knowing someone who’s witnessed the absurdity of big-budget studio movies – a body that needs to be taken seriously.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is a regular contributor to The AV Club, Polygon, and Sunday, among others. He also podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com.
