Sundance Review || "Advantageous"

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 29 January 2015 01:02

Written by Matt Oakes

Metaphysical bodysnatching from the POV of the snatcher, Advantageous is a soft sci-fi-drama centered around a cool idea but repeatedly undone by shoddy execution, unconvincing performances and dreadful FX. Commendable though Jennifer Phang's mother-daughter relationship study might be in the context of Sundance's overabundance of father-son sagas, Phang is able to capitalize on the maternal bonds between ejector and ejected but has no idea which direction to take it in after it's been established. Instead, it's bagged up, zip-tied and casually thrown into an ebb of "does it really matter?"

The future is now in Phang's minimalist economic fiction and it's one that's risibly domineered by white dudes. Though women aren't technically banned from having jobs, there is an increasingly dominant movement to blast back to the past and re-adopt the Baby Booming mentality of staying at home, making waffles and secretly scarfing cocktails. The commentary isn't subtle, but neither is the film.

Gwen (Jacqueline Kim) is a single mother, promptly aging out of her cushy position as the face of an appearance engineering firm that's the modern day evolution of plastic surgery. Faced with the reality that her 40something year old countenance  just isn't paying the bills anymore, she's forced to make a decision to play guinea pig to a new game-changing procedure that will transfer her consciousness into a younger, more form-fitting body.

This presents obvious mommy issues that extend well beyond the whole "I'm disorientated because Mom's got a new face" factor and the narrative problems underlying Gwen's motivation plague the should-be emotionally hefty moments in its later parts. It doesn't help that the future society in which Gwen and daughter Jules (newcomer Samantha Kim) is populated by half-finished CGI that add nothing to the film aside from a general sense of haphazardness. One is forced to assume that either the money tank ran dry or the effect guys didn't finish their work. A sadly definitive blanket statement about the film at large.

The appearance of Ken Jeong on the cast list comes as a major red flag though he ends up the least to blame for the frequent failures of Advantageous. The depressing thing is that cinema needs more movies like this: that feature foreign voices, foreign actors and women in the spotlight in front of and behind the camera. But to celebrate the film for its makeup rather than its internal worth is a misstep as well. Ultimately, Advantageous is an unsatisifying, unremarkable, incomplete feeling soft sci-fi that should have been so much more and could have been with a few more coats of paint.

D+

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