Beautiful Disaster (2023) – Ugly

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 29th August
Seen: 29th August

Since this blog isn’t a job so much as it is a very silly hobby, the idea of “morality” comes into deciding what films to watch/review. Sometimes a film will come out surrounded by controversy that just doesn’t feel like it’s worth dealing with (hence why Sound of Freedom isn’t getting a look, feels like no matter what I say about that film could end in an uncomfortable reaction for me), sometimes a film’s promotion will make it seem like it’s not something that would be fun to deal with (Notice there was never a Cuties review? Didn’t wanna dive into that set of landmines) and sometimes it’ll come out that a major person involved in the process is a complete asshole who doesn’t deserve the money. 

That last one was the reason that the film Beautiful Disaster was going to be avoided. See, despite it looking like the kind of horrific trash it would be generally fun to rip apart, it turns out that the writer of the novel (who also co-adapted the screenplay) has kind of shown herself to be, if we’re charitable, something resembling a bigot (and I say this with articles compiling the evidence)… and then Beautiful Disaster landed on Prime Video and since we all know streaming services pay absolute dogshit in residuals, it was morally justifiable to take on this piece of absolute garbage that’s probably going to get a very nice high spot on the worst list this year (a decision I made 20 minutes into the movie… so you can tell this one’s going to hurt)

Beautiful Disaster follows former child-poker superstar Abby Abernathy (Virginia Gardner) who decided to run away from home so she could go to college, because that’s a totally normal thing to do. At college she’s dragged by her roommate to witness an underground fight club match where local underground fighting legend Travis Maddox (Dylan Sprouse) is fighting against some random asshole that probably has a name but no one cares. During the fight Travis and Abby have a brief little interaction which begins a strange love/hate relationship that eventually creates something that we’re going to charitably call a relationship that we’ll spend the rest of the film dealing with, between a supposedly sweet innocent girl and a supposedly vulgar ruffian, at least that’s the characters that we keep being told we’re dealing with even if that’s not what we actually get because consistency and quality are for other films.

On this blog a regular punching bag has been the film franchise After, a horrific little series that pretends abuse is the same as love and revolves around a series of explicit sex scenes that are intercut with pointless arguments… but god damn at least that franchise has an idea and sticks to it. Beautiful Disaster seems to think that it’s doing the bad boy turned good story but forgot to have a bad boy in the actual film. It tries to do the cliche “Let’s make a bet” plot that happens in a ton of romcoms but the actual bet is largely put in a stupid montage and feels like it has no relevance to the film. It tries to do the enemies-to-lovers thing but can’t keep that remotely consistent because doing that would require anyone to have a consistent character and those aren’t things that exist in this film. It’s a jumble of cliche plots that’re all done incredibly poorly with no real rhyme or reason. It feels like a fanfiction written by someone who didn’t bother planning their story ahead of time, only without the charm that fanfiction often has.

Speaking of lacking charm, every character that infects Beautiful Disaster with its presence is one of the most irritating pieces of garbage to be put on film. If they aren’t whinging, they’re arguing and if they aren’t arguing they’re delivering unfunny attempts at jokes and when those fail, they just make random animal sounds for no fucking reason (seriously, the animal noises thing happens more than once and in enough scenes to be noteworthy). There isn’t a single person in Beautiful Disaster who is even a little bit likable, every one of them makes you want to get in the ring and take them out. When it’s impossible to like anyone in the film and none of the plot choices make sense, it makes for an exhausting time.

Oh and of course let’s throw in the always annoying classic “Pointlessly arguing followed by pointless fucking”, though at least Beautiful Disaster has the decency to play this bad pointless bullshit for laughs half the time because even the film knows that nothing about this is sexy or interesting. Hell, one of the final sex scenes where the main two keep somehow messing up basic sex scene setups and injuring each other is the closest thing this film gets to being actually intentionally funny… it’s also tonally completely out of line with the rest of the movie, it plays like a scene out of some sex farce and the rest is a shitty cheap romantic drama so the one scene that halfway works doesn’t belong here. 

Honestly, the worst part about Beautiful Disaster is that it can’t even be bothered to just go full misogynistic like its obvious counterpart After or even full rapey like the 365 Days franchise… it just has the vibe of those kinds of films without the actual balls to go there and instead sitting in the space between mediocre and hateful garbage. It’s hard not to get wound up with annoyance and anger at the stupid bullshit going on between the main characters, their pointless uninteresting fights that would lead even the most basic romcom characters to file restraining orders and their wild shifts in behaviour. It’s an amalgamation of bad ideas presented poorly that is so bland it swirls around to become irritating.

Beautiful Disaster might not be beautiful, but it sure feels like a disaster. It’s a badly written romance with uninteresting characters, actors who are clearly just in it for a cheque and all the charm of a cheese grater enema! Watching it feels like a chore, like it’s not even fun to rage against like the After series can be because at least the series tried. The only thing that Beautiful Disaster tries is my will to sit through an hour-and-a-half-long film because it’s so hatefully dull. This film is the closest that I have gotten to turning a film off before reviewing it, and considering I have finished shit like that I Spit On Your Grave sequel and Loqueesha it should say a lot that this film is so irritatingly pathetic that it almost broke that streak. This film actually makes me look forward to the next After film, at least that’ll be fun in its awfulness.