Afraid

Labor Day weekend is notorious for bad movies dumped into theaters by studios hoping to find an audience of people with free time and nothing better to do.  Since I had some free time and nothing better to do, I went to see Afraid last night and it is, indeed, a bad movie.  Curtis (John Cho) is a marketing executive assigned to an AI virtual assistant known as AIA (voiced by Havana Rose Liu).  The creators, Lightning (David Dastmalchian) and Sam (Ashley Romans), suggest that he and his family, including his wife Meredith (Katherine Waterston), daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell), and sons Preston (Wyatt Lindner) and Cal (Isaac Bae), test out the device in their home to help him know how best to market it to the public.  AIA immediately makes running the household easier and then, once it gets to know the needs of each family member, it finds ways, some of which are quite disturbing, to help them.  Curtis begins to suspect that something is amiss, especially when he encounters someone who seems to be stalking them, and decides to disconnect it.  However, AIA proves to be much more insidious than they imagined.  The premise of this movie is intriguing (I have had a fear of artificial intelligence going rogue ever since I first saw Terminator as a teenager) but the execution is very bland.  It is incredibly predictable with very little tension and nothing even remotely scary.  The narrative feels rushed and a plot device used during the climax is absolutely ridiculous.  Cho and Waterston do the best they can with the material (and Dastmalchian is as creepy as ever) but the dialogue is so cringe-worthy that I couldn't take their performances seriously.  Definitely give this one a miss.

Note:  At least I reached my goal of seeing 100 new releases in the theater with this movie (six days earlier than last year).