During the 2000s, no movie star could drum up hate from all sides like Megan Fox. She was the face of Michael Bay’s Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchises. Bay became shorthand for “worst movies ever,” leaving Fox with the obvious “worst actress ever” label. During that era, which saw tons of terrible films, few ever thought to ask how talented a performer Fox actually was. The answer, it turns out, is that she’s fine in projects like Subservience, which recently made Amazon’s streaming audience obey its commands.
Subservience Sees Megan Fox Dominate Amazon Prime Video
Subservience is, boiled down to its trace elements, a version of M3GAN in which M3GAN is attractive. It’s about an AI gynoid who joins a struggling household, becomes overzealous in her programming, and eventually threatens her users’ lives. While M3GAN is a protective friend to a child, Fox’s Alice is a domestic servant who develops a romantic obsession. Eroticism is central to the film’s tone, using Fox’s almost all-consuming sexuality to create an unnerving atmosphere. There are elements of a compelling romance film in a regular man choosing between his human wife and a hot robot with no desires beyond pleasing him. Subservience, as the title suggests, touches on that theme at times, but it never digs in deep enough. Again, like M3GAN, the film leans on familiar tropes and winds up fairly generic as a result. Oddly enough, Megan Fox is the film’s shining light.
What has Fox been up to since her break with Michael Bay? Obviously, she became half of the world’s most annoying power couple with rapper Machine Gun Kelly. That kept her in the spotlight while her work struggled through the shadows. She played actress Soledad Miranda in James Franco’s disastrous Zeroville. Fox bizarrely popped up as an American war correspondent during the Korean War in The Battle of Jangsari. In my personal pick for Fox’s best-worst film, she starred in Rogue, in which a terrible CGI lioness stalks both sides of a pitched gun battle. Her opus might be Til Death, Fox’s first collaboration with Subservience director S. K. Dale. It’s an almost Hitchcockian thriller in which Fox finds herself handcuffed to her dead spouse. I personally recommend it over Subservience, and I’d also recommend anything she’s in over Expend4bles.
If anything, Megan Fox’s star has risen considerably since her last major box-office hit. It’s actually unfair to call Subservience a box-office flop. The film didn’t screen in most worldwide theaters, but it did drop into a few multiplexes in Russia and Lithuania. Its six-digit box-office take is to be expected when barely anyone could willfully go see it. Subservience found success on streaming because that’s where it was always meant to be. Maybe if it copied M3GAN enough to make Fox do a TikTok dance, it would have hit the big screen.
