Insurgent
The official name of the movie alone is a bad start: The Divergent Series: Insurgent. So clunky, so official and lifeless. But hey, I guess it’s better than Divergent: Insurgent or Young Adult Paychecks: Part II.
The thing about second installments in series like Divergent is that if you’re not all in — if you didn’t buy into the world that it creates, the plot it pushes and the characters it tries to make you care about — things tend to drag. This is the case here. Everything that made Divergent fun, most memorably the standard character transformations and development that happened before the action took hold, does not exist in Insurgent. Instead, we get a pedal-to-the-metal plot train from scene one, and if you haven’t found your seat on the Tris Prior Express, you’re going to fall off pretty early on.
Tris, the movie’s heroine, is once again portrayed admirably by Shailene Woodley (The Fault in Our Stars). And once again, she finds herself fighting against all odds in her dystopian society. She must team up with the other Divergents — including Theo James (Divergent), who still plays a character named Four — to take down evil dictator Jeanine (Kate Winslet, A Little Chaos) while trying to battle her inner demons. Tris is plagued by the idea that everyone around her is dying and getting hurt in her quest to make her world right, and she fights this idea almost as much as Jeanine’s henchmen.
Along the way, Four meets his presumed-dead, factionless mother, played surprisingly and unremarkably by Naomi Watts (While We’re Young); Tris has some problems with her brother Caleb (still played awkwardly by her The Fault in Our Stars lover Ansel Elgort) and former friend Peter — the already-too-good-for-this-series Miles Teller (Two Night Stand); and Octavia Spencer does motherly Octavia Spencer things.
Spencer and Watts are two impressive additions to an already overqualified cast. Winslet and Woodley especially do fine work, trying with all their artistic might to bring scenes with any emotion to life and to make the unbelievable situations their characters find themselves in seem somewhat enthralling.
The acting is matched in quality by some of the special effects, as the film crew uses many simulation sequences to create this imagined world and spectacles that are especially powerful in the IMAX 3-D format. Aesthetically, it’s exciting, but the things that happen in this world soon get so repetitive and flimsy that we want to leave the CGI wonderland.
There is no doubt that this film boasts impressive elements. The problem is, all of them feel wasted on a lost cause. The material this movie is built around is too weak — the emotion too hokey, the premise too sloppy — to make any kind of great work worth the effort. If only Insurgent were simply horrible, maybe it wouldn’t be so frustrating.
