{"id":3771,"date":"2024-08-31T03:40:49","date_gmt":"2024-08-31T03:40:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=3771"},"modified":"2024-10-14T13:50:59","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T17:50:59","slug":"afraid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/08\/31\/afraid\/","title":{"rendered":"AfrAId"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"AfrAId <\/strong>(2024)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Columbia\/Sci-Fi-Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 84 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (sexual material, some strong violence, some strong language, thematic material)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Chris Weitz\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Chris Weitz\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Alex Weston\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Javier Aguirresarobe\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: August 30, 2024 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: \u00bd *<\/p>\n

\u00a0Silly 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\u2019t need to be made). It turns out I was wrong, dead wrong. The dumb techno-thriller AfrAId<\/strong> is easily the worst film of the summer, maybe even the whole year. It\u2019s no accident Sony chose to dump it in multiplexes at the very end of August. It\u2019s 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\u2019t help. If anything, it made it an even bigger mess.<\/p>\n

\u00a0As you can probably surmise from the title\u2019s spelling, AfrAId<\/strong> deals with AI and the insidious nature of it. In this instance, it\u2019s 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\u2019s supposed to make life easier. We all know that won\u2019t be the case here. Would there be a movie if it was?<\/p>\n

\u00a0Marketing 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\u2019s 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\u2019s because she bribes the boys to do what they\u2019re supposed to do- e.g. chores, bathe, go to school, etc.- with points that can be turned in for rewards.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Predictably, even if you haven\u2019t seen the trailer that\u2019s 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\u2019s with the strange people living in the motor home parked across the street from their house? What do they want? Then there\u2019s the matter of Iris\u2019 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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I have to be honest here. There\u2019s a good reason why I can\u2019t drop any spoilers about the ending of AfrAId<\/strong>. I didn\u2019t understand it. Among its many crimes, the movie doesn\u2019t explain itself clearly. It\u2019s one of the biggest non-endings I\u2019ve seen in a long time. It\u2019s 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\u2019t tell you what AIA really is. All I know for sure is that she\u2019s bad. It might have something to do with a desire to understand humanity, but I can\u2019t be certain.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 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\u2019s somehow connected to all that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0So what then is the point of AfrAId<\/strong>? 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\u2019s not the slightest bit scary or suspenseful. It got so slow, I started mentally writing my review while it was still running. It\u2019s only 84 minutes, but it feels like an eternity. You keep waiting for something even remotely interesting to happen, but it doesn\u2019t. AfrAId<\/strong> goes wrong in every way possible. I can\u2019t believe somebody thought it was suitable for release.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The only shocking thing about AfrAId<\/strong> is that it\u2019s 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\u2019t believe he\u2019s 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***?<\/p>\n

\u00a0The acting in AfrAId<\/strong> is truly terrible which is fine since there\u2019s 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\u2019 boss. It\u2019s a thankless role basically. I suspect he took it just to retain his SAG status.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Take it from Movie Guy 24\/7, AfrAId<\/strong> is a great big PU. It\u2019s 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\u2019s dull, lazy, incoherent and positively pointless. I\u2019d like to forget it ever happened.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AfrAId (2024)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Columbia\/Sci-Fi-Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 84 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (sexual material, some strong violence, some strong language, thematic material)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Chris Weitz\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Chris Weitz\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Alex Weston\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Javier Aguirresarobe\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: August 30, 2024 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell, Wyatt Lindner, Isaac Bae, Keith Carradine, David Dastmalchian, Ashley […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4425,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-horror","category-this-sucks-so-bad"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/AfrAId-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3771"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4427,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3771\/revisions\/4427"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}