Stream It or Skip It: 'Subservience' on Netflix, with Megan Fox ...

Megan Fox is no longer the It Girl of the moment for Hollywood movies, but she’s found a lucrative and sometimes quite enjoyable career as a B-movie lead. In Subservience, she leans into her old pin-up image as a sexy robo-helper who gets troublingly attached to the family she lives with. Is the movie in on the joke, or just another laughable DTV affair?

SUBSERVIENCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nick (Michele Morrone, the hunk from Netflix’s 365dni) needs help. A construction worker in an increasingly digital near-future, he’s also tasked with taking care of his kids full-time when his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) must endure long-term hospitalization to treat a heart problem. Luckily, there’s an upside to humanity approaching obsolescence: the relative affordability and availability of helper androids. Soon an unsettlingly attractive robot named Alice (Megan Fox) is lending a hand around the house with chores and even parenting. But when Maggie returns home, Alice starts to get territorial about “her” family, particularly her attachment to Nick. Just think of Subservience as M3GAN Fox.

What Will It Remind You Of?: Oh, what won’t it remind you of? Besides the obvious parallels to M3GAN, it’s pretty much a sci-fi spin on ’90s femme-fatale domestic thrillers like The Hand That Rocks The Cradle or Fatal Attraction.

Performance Worth Watching: Though she’s not the point-of-view character, this movie belongs to Megan Fox. She hasn’t always had an easy time finding the right vehicle for her particular affect in the years since the underrated Jennifer’s Body flopped. But director S.K. Dale, making his second Fox vehicle after the fun Till Death, understands that his leading lady’s sometimes-flat delivery can be an asset, and Fox herself is obviously having some self-aware fun with her image as she gradually unleashes her inner Terminator (the bad-guy one from the first movie, only convinced she’s more like the protector from T2).

Memorable Dialogue: Who needs dialogue for punchlines when you have the look on Maggie’s face when she first lays eyes on her family’s new helper?

Sex and Skin: Spoiler: Nick and Alice do get it on, although it’s soft-pedaled as Alice manipulating Nick in a weak and stressful moment, even blindfolding him and using Maggie’s voice to put him at ease, rather than, you know, Nick wanting to have sex with the Foxbot. But yes, you do see Megan Fox’s butt. Presumably the robot keeps her bra on during sex because she’s seen a lot of Hollywood movies.

Our Take: Let’s be clear up front: Subservience isn’t the delightful surprise of Till Death, the earlier collaboration between Fox and Dale. (Hopefully these are the first two of many, given his obvious interest in crafting fun B-movies around her whole deal.) The earlier film jolted to life from a sleepy-looking domestic melodrama into a surprisingly immediate and well-crafted limited-location thriller; Subservience, by virtue of its irresistible premise and reteamed star and director, has higher expectations going in. This means it has more opportunities to disappoint, and there are moments where it feels like the movie should be going a little harder: a little more suspenseful, a little weirder, a little more hopped-up energy. On the other hand, Subservience is a better movie than we should probably expect from “Megan Fox plays some boring guy’s robo-servant.” It’s an efficient and entertaining perils-of-automation sci-fi thriller with that extra bit of juice from casting a notorious personality at its center, and a reminder that Fox, for all of her junky movies and off-screen antics, does have a certain kind of self-aware star quality.

Our Call: If you’re in the mood for a sci-fi B-movie, STREAM IT. Just know (unlike Nick) what you’re getting into here.

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.

Watch Subservience on Netflix