JP Nunez
AI has a long and storied cinematic history. From classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner to modern gems like Upgrade and Ex Machina, it’s featured in some of the best genre films ever made. It’s pretty much become its own trope, and when done well, it can be amazing. So naturally, when I first got wind of AfrAId, I was instantly intrigued. I thought the trailer showed some promise, and I decided to check it out. Granted, I didn’t expect it to be one of the best movies of the year, but I hoped it would be another fun entry in the AI canon.
AfrAId was written and directed by Chris Weitz, and it stars John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu, Lukita Maxwell, David Dastmalchian, and Keith Carradine. In the film, the Pike family—Curtis, Meredith, and their three kids–get the opportunity of a lifetime. They’re given a new AI assistant named AIA, and this thing puts real-life AI systems like Siri and Alexa to shame.
It’s like having another person in their home, and at first, it seems to be an absolute godsend. AIA helps with everything from the family’s insurance issues to the children’s problems at school, but soon enough, the program begins to display a dark side. It’s a bit too dedicated to the Pikes, and it doesn’t care what it has to do or who it has to hurt to help them.
For the first 35-40 minutes or so, AfrAId focuses primarily on introducing us to the characters, and it’s surprisingly great. Everybody in this cast, from the headlining stars to the bit players, is completely believable, so I enjoyed watching these people go about their daily lives, even when they weren’t doing anything particularly thrilling or interesting. Even the kids are excellent, and as any movie fan knows, that’s a laudable feat in itself.
But once the Pikes set AIA up in their house, the film starts to go downhill. As I said, the program seems like a huge blessing for the family, and we’ve seen that trope multiple times before. It just has a very “been there, done that” kind of vibe to it, and in a particular way, it feels like the Walmart version of last year’s standout evil AI flick, M3GAN.
To be fair, AfrAId isn’t just a carbon copy of that movie. Unlike the titular M3GAN, AIA is just a program, not a robot, and this film incorporates real-life AI a bit more. Most notably, there’s a scene where a high school boy makes a deepfake porn video of Curtis and Meredith’s daughter, and as you can probably guess, the girl is utterly mortified. She thinks her life is ruined, but luckily, AIA comes to the rescue. The program removes all traces of the video from the internet, and it turns the tables on the perpetrator by creating a few clever videos of its own.
I have to give AfrAId props for exploring real-life AI in a way most genre films, even recent ones, don’t or can’t, but unfortunately, it’s not enough to salvage the second act of this movie. At best, it feels like it simply transposes something we’ve seen before into a different key, but it’s still the same idea that’s been recycled numerous times already.
On top of all that, the scares in AfrAId are even more generic, and that’s not just an act-two problem. The film opens with a horror scene that seems completely unrelated to the main story (but as usual, we eventually find out that it’s not), and it starts the experience off on the wrong foot. It tries to be creepy and atmospheric, but it just feels like every other scare we’ve ever seen before.
Thankfully, the great performances from the main cast easily overcome that one initial flaw, but when the horror returns later on, it tips the scales back to the negative side. As I sit here writing this review, I honestly can’t think of a single scare that caught my attention, and I literally just got back from the theater less than an hour ago. The horror in AfrAId is so bland and cliched that not even the great performances can save this movie, and with a cast lead by John Cho and Katherine Waterston, that’s saying something.
Last but not least, I want to talk a bit about the third act. I’m not going to give anything away, but I will say that this part of the film features an unexpected twist that had the potential to be interesting. That is if it wasn’t a blatant rip-off of another AI movie that’s less than a decade old. Naming the film would be a spoiler, but trust me, if you’ve seen it, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about and you’ll probably roll your eyes just as hard as I did.
So at the end of the day, I’m sad to report that I wouldn’t recommend AfrAId. Sure, the movie isn’t horrible, and it does have a few bright spots (namely, the first act). But in the second act, it turns into a bland, uninteresting rehash of ideas that have been done better in other films, and it never redeems itself. As I said before, it ends up feeling like the Walmart version of M3GAN, so if you’re in the mood for some fun AI thrills, just watch that modern gem instead.
AfrAId is playing in theaters right now.
