AfrAId (2024) review

Dir. Chris Weitz

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★½

I am all for anything that actively criticizes or showcases the dangers of artificial intelligence. I find its rapid progression and adoption to be one of the singular greatest threats to creativity, even more-so than politics in some respect. I can’t, however, get behind a terrible movie, which is what AfrAId is.

Here’s a thriller so ill-conceived and bizarrely written that I would not be surprised if writer/director Chris Weitz tasked ChatGPT to author large portions of the script. Fitting that AfrAId comes out on Labor Day weekend, a time where Americans coast-to-coast are so preoccupied with travel and the conclusion of summer, many of whom far too busy to give a damn about a lackluster new movie that will leave theaters as swiftly as it entered them.

We meet the Pike family, where dad Curtis (John Cho) works at some vague marketing corporation that forces him to test a new smart-home AI device called AIA (pronounced “I-yah”). It is a product of a company run by Ashley Romans and David Dastmalchian with a bowl-cut. This digital assistant (voiced by Havana Rose Liu of Blockers) immediately makes an impact on the family: mom Meredith (Katherine Waterston), teen daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell), middle-child Preston (Wyatt Lindner), and youngster Cal (Isaac Bae).

AIA incentivizes Cal and Preston to do their chores with a point-based system, which never gets mentioned after it’s introduced. “She” helps Iris when her boyfriend makes a deepfake porn video of her that circulates throughout the school. Mom gets wine-drunk with AIA and reveals details of her college thesis. This is a family more troubled than the average Kardashian.

One of the elements that makes AfrAId lose credibility early on is the fact that AIA can pretty much do anything. She can tap into any device, from Cal’s iPad to an old radio. She can also control the pedals of a car not driven by a member of the family. The depth of her interference is absolutely astonishing, and because either Weitz or Blumhouse seemed ardent on having this film end in less than 80 minutes, the events that should be significant to the plot lack both cause and effect.

Consider Iris’ dilemma when the aforementioned deepfake video surfaces. Her boyfriend’s justification for its existence was that him and his friend were “messing around.” AIA vows to make the video go away. In minutes, she manufactures a Snapchat-statement with Iris’ likeness and files a lawsuit against her boyfriend for child pornography, being that Iris is a minor. All of this happens so quickly that there’s barely any conflict and only the most lackadaisical attempt at resolve.

There’s also something seriously odd with Weitz’s screenplay. Characters converse with lines that land like lead balloons. The performers’ awkwardness is palpable when it comes to reciting various sentences. I half-expected the film to end with a statement saying Weitz employed some sort of AI device for the screenplay in effort to prove a point. It should be considered a crime to have someone as consistently amiable and human as John Cho leading a movie as misguided as this one. AfrAId is clunkily written, but given its terribly brief runtime, it doesn’t have much time to establish much of anything significant.

The third act amounts to little besides dizzying cinematic whiplash. Weitz hurls a small series of twists at his audience, all of which half-baked because his script never took time to develop AIA, the company behind her, or much of anything. AfrAId is a thriller whose own intelligence is artificial at best, yet it’s one of the better kinds of bad movies, for it’s short and, in some ways, outright dismissive of the many ways in which it sucks.

Starring: John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Lukita Maxwell, Wyatt Lindner, Isaac Bae, Ashley Romans, David Dastmalchian, and Keith Carradine. Voiced by: Havana Rose Liu. Directed by: Chris Weitz.