AfrAId (2024) Columbia/Sci-Fi-Horror RT: 84 minutes Rated PG-13 (sexual material, some strong violence, some strong language, thematic material) Director: Chris Weitz Screenplay: Chris Weitz Music: Alex Weston Cinematography: Javier Aguirresarobe Release date: August 30, 2024 (US) Cast: John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell, Wyatt Lindner, Isaac Bae, Keith Carradine, David Dastmalchian, Ashley Romans, Bennett Curran, Riki Lindhome, Greg Hill, Todd Waring, Maya Manko.
Rating: ½ *
Silly me, I thought the summer movie season hit rock bottom with the back-to-back stinkers that came out last week, Blink Twice and The Crow (a remake that didn’t need to be made). It turns out I was wrong, dead wrong. The dumb techno-thriller AfrAId is easily the worst film of the summer, maybe even the whole year. It’s no accident Sony chose to dump it in multiplexes at the very end of August. It’s beyond terrible. It has all the tell-tale signs of a movie that underwent some last-minute post-production tweaking by the studio. It didn’t help. If anything, it made it an even bigger mess.
As you can probably surmise from the title’s spelling, AfrAId deals with AI and the insidious nature of it. In this instance, it’s a device called AIA. Think of Alexa or Siri Plus. It can do anything its users need it to do- e.g. pay the bills, take care of the kids, diagnose ailments, etc. It’s supposed to make life easier. We all know that won’t be the case here. Would there be a movie if it was?
Marketing guy Curtis (Cho of the Harold & Kumar films) agrees to do a test run in his own home after listening to the pitch from the company’s creepy reps, Lightning (Dastmalchian, Late Night with the Devil) and Sam (Romans, Y: The Last Man). His initially skeptical wife Meredith (Waterston, Alien: Covenant) comes to see AIA as a godsend upon realizing it will allow her to devote more time to finishing her doctorate in entomology. The kids- high schooler Iris (Maxwell, Generation), preteen son Preston (Lindner) and youngest Cal (Bae)- come to love AIA too. Maybe it’s because she bribes the boys to do what they’re supposed to do- e.g. chores, bathe, go to school, etc.- with points that can be turned in for rewards.
Predictably, even if you haven’t seen the trailer that’s been running ad nauseam all summer, AIA has a sinister side to her. Curtis begins to suspect as much when weird things start happening. For example, what’s with the strange people living in the motor home parked across the street from their house? What do they want? Then there’s the matter of Iris’ d-bag boyfriend (Curran) creating a deepfake porn video of her. The way AIA deals with him is the very definition of going too far. Somehow Mom and Dad remain completely oblivious to this particular situation. How is that possible? This is just one of several unanswered questions in AfrAId.
I have to be honest here. There’s a good reason why I can’t drop any spoilers about the ending of AfrAId. I didn’t understand it. Among its many crimes, the movie doesn’t explain itself clearly. It’s one of the biggest non-endings I’ve seen in a long time. It’s like the makers decided it was time to wrap things up so they came up with something that resembles a conclusion. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t tell you what AIA really is. All I know for sure is that she’s bad. It might have something to do with a desire to understand humanity, but I can’t be certain.
The voice of AIA is provided by Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms) who also plays a mysterious AIA employee named Melody who seems to have a crush on Curtis. She’s somehow connected to all that’s going on as are the parents of a little girl who went missing after playing with AIA. All of this amounts to nothing; it just creates more confusion.
So what then is the point of AfrAId? Is it trying to make a statement about tech and our overreliance on it? Probably, but it has nothing new to say on the subject. As a horror movie, it fails even more miserably. It’s not the slightest bit scary or suspenseful. It got so slow, I started mentally writing my review while it was still running. It’s only 84 minutes, but it feels like an eternity. You keep waiting for something even remotely interesting to happen, but it doesn’t. AfrAId goes wrong in every way possible. I can’t believe somebody thought it was suitable for release.
The only shocking thing about AfrAId is that it’s not the work of some young neophyte making his first feature film. The guy behind this dud is Chris Weitz doing triple duty as writer, director and producer. This is a major WTF moment for me. I can’t believe he’s the same filmmaker who gave us the wonderful rom-com About a Boy, never mind it was more than 20 years ago. How did he get mixed up with this s***?
The acting in AfrAId is truly terrible which is fine since there’s no character development of which to speak. The characters are shallow and one-dimensional even for a horror movie. The kids, for example, are defined by single traits. Middle child Preston suffers from anxiety issues. Precocious little Cal is sickly. Iris has no personality at all unless you count stupidity. How does she not know her so-called boyfriend is an a**hole? What does she think he plans to do with the boobie pic he pressures her to send him? Keith Carradine (Nashville) shows up in a few scenes as Curtis’ boss. It’s a thankless role basically. I suspect he took it just to retain his SAG status.
Take it from Movie Guy 24/7, AfrAId is a great big PU. It’s terrible even by the low, low standards of movies released at the end of the summer. It makes all the other stinkers look a little bit (a VERY little bit) better. It’s dull, lazy, incoherent and positively pointless. I’d like to forget it ever happened.
