It’s been 15 years since Megan Fox had the presumably bizarre experience of achieving a career apex and nadir all at once. In 2009, she co-starred in the second-highest-grossing U.S. release of the year, and easily the biggest of her career, with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and a few months later had her first real non-love-interest lead in Jennifer’s Body, a horror film from acclaimed director Karyn Kusama and screenwriter Diablo Cody, and pretty handily the best movie she’s ever made. But the press and the public both got mixed up, and somehow Fox got the short end of both movies. The really good one wasn’t recognized as such until years later – Jennifer’s Body now has its appreciative cult – and somehow a major story emerging from the terrible Transformers sequel was that Fox got bounced from its own follow-up, while maybe it should have been framed as a triumphant escape. Somehow, anything that went wrong with her movies was her fault, and as a cartoonishly hot young woman, she was simply reaping what she had sown with her own attention-seeking.
Like a lot of young women pilloried by the media in the 2000s, Fox was eventually reevaluated – though that hasn’t really resulted in her reclaiming a major movie career. Following her great and terrible 2009, she kidded her own bombshell image in comedies like This Is 40 and Friends with Kids, and did a well-received stint on New Girl. She took a thankless live-action part of those Ninja Turtle movies produced by her Transformers director Michael Bay. And since that series dead-ended, she’s mostly been turning up in direct-to-video-level programmers, perhaps wanting to make movies on her terms, rather than toiling away to prove herself in a franchise-dominated Hollywood.
A bright spot in Fox’s recent filmography is S.K. Dale’s Till Death, in which she plays a wife trapped in a dead marriage – figuratively and then literally, as her husband handcuffs himself to her, commits suicide, and leaves her to lug around his body while fighting off hired killers. It’s both ludicrous and perfectly scaled, a ghoulish gimmick and a hilariously overt metaphor for relationship baggage, calling upon the scrappiness beyond Fox’s sultry looks.
Now it looks as if Fox has found a creative partner who understands her image without reducing it to a joke, because she and Dale have made another movie together: the sci-fi thriller Subservience. Admittedly, this one sounds exactly like a joke, and not a particularly clever one: Fox plays a sexbot who menaces a happy family! But Alice, the robot Fox plays here, isn’t actually a conduit for male pleasure – at least not directly or exclusively. She’s a domestic aid, offering some extra parenting help to Nick (365 DNI stud Michele Morrone) while his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) has a prolonged hospital stay, awaiting a heart transplant. Nick’s skepticism – he’s seen automatons taking jobs in his workplace and has been forced to grit his teeth and accept it – is overridden by the relief of having help around the house. Alice becomes so attuned to the ebb and flow of that relief that she starts to override her own programming, allegedly to place Nick’s health and well-being above all.
There’s sharp commentary buried somewhere here about the way the world caters to the needs of men, constructing whole-ass super-robots just to assist with the basic competencies of work and family, though the movie is ultimately too sympathetic toward Nick to engage in any real satire. At least its sense of understanding extends toward Nick and Maggie’s marriage, which is not written with the same amused toxicity as the relationship in Till Death. There’s genuine love and desire between husband and wife, even with a potential sexbot lurking around.
That role should be a stock one, and it doesn’t give Fox as much to do as Till Death. As a whole, Subservience isn’t quite as good as the earlier Dale/Fox picture; it has less forward momentum, less ingenuity in the construction of its action, and more familiar contours in the tech-gone-mad genre. (I seem to recall another Megan who went nuts on the family she was supposed to protect!) At the same time, the movie has fun casting Fox in the role of a subservient robot who eventually offers herself to her “primary user” for the greater good, winking at the way Fox has so often been received as a male fantasy made flesh, rather than an actual person who happens to be gorgeous.
That tension is explored with greater and thornier perceptiveness in Jennifer’s Body, where her mean-girl indifference is distorted into gender-specific monstrousness (boy-eating on one hand; bestie dismissiveness on the other) that blurs the line between bad friend and demonic possession. But Subservience also winks at Fox’s whole acting style. She still has the baby-voiced affect of a pop star singing through her nose and can summon pitiless looks of contempt, which makes her an easy target for criticism – as well as ideal casting for tart-tongued comedy, slasher horror, or, as it happens, a sci-fi world where robots respond with a kind of stiff-voiced intensity. There’s a funny scene where multiple babysitting robots are thrown into straight-faced parenting-by-proxy conflict at a playground, matter-of-factly stating the rude thoughts plenty of parents have in those situations. Even when Subservience turns Alice into a standard-issue murder droid, Fox’s robotic moments have a clean-lined zest. She somehow appears to be having fun without breaking character.
A semi-diverting, straight-to-VOD killer-tech thriller isn’t going to vault Fox back onto the A-list. Even in the best of circumstances, it seems unlikely that her career would have matched some of the women who started off in movies around the same time, like Emma Stone or Jennifer Lawrence. Fox seems at peace with that. In Dale’s movies so far, she gets to be a B-movie queen with the knowing layer of someone who has witnessed the greater absurdities of big-budget studio movies – a body worth taking seriously.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
