10 Recent Movies That Made INSANE Choices
6. The Ridiculous Casting - Uglies
Casting is everything, and Netflix's recent adaptation of Scott Westerfeld's young adult novel Uglies was doomed the moment they decided to cast the movie this way.
Given that the film's dystopian central concept revolves around "ugly" people who are "prettified" at the age of 16, many took umbrage with the ensemble cast being played by conventionally good-looking people like Joey King, Keith Powers, Chase Stokes, and Brianne Tju.
But in fairness, that's not really the problem here - the entire point of the story is that the protagonists are chasing impossible and unreasonable beauty standards, so it doesn't really matter what they look like at the outset.
The issue is that the actors are just way too old to be playing 15-17 year olds. Joey King is pushing it at 25 years of age, but the real kicker is Chase Stokes, who at 32 years old is playing someone literally half his age.
The casting is ridiculous enough that the already-flimsy narrative is downright impossible to take seriously as anything but an unintentional farce.
While it absolutely makes sense that Netflix might want to cast actors who are 18 or older to avoid dealing with child labour laws, they really ended up tossing believability right out the window from the jump.