When I saw last year’s DIVERGENT,
I enjoyed it more than I thought I would – despite a ridiculous premise and a Jansport-worth
of teen melodrama, it still managed to leverage its strong cast and cook up
some decent sci-fi action. THE DIVERGENT SERIES: INSURGENT, the second film in the trilogy, is
bigger, slower, and dumber in almost every way.
If you saw the first film, you already
know that Earth’s last inhabited city is genetically divided into five single-function social
factions – Abnegation (government), Candor (law), Dauntless (security), Amity
(food) and Erudite (science) – plus a factionless proletariat and a new,
irrationally feared amalgam of the above five, dubbed Divergent.
Last we saw, Divergent Tris
(Shailene Woodley) and her rag-tag group of apple cart-tippers – boyfriend Four
(Theo James), brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort), and the aptly named Peter (Miles
Teller) – were on the run after
attempting to foil the megalomaniacal Erudite Jeanine’s (Kate Winslet) plot to
mind-control Dauntless into slaughtering Abnegation.
What you don’t know is that Jeanine’s
whole reason for going all Bond villain was to get her hands on an ancient box that
can only be opened by a Divergent, leading her to conclude that it probably
contains a message telling folks to kill all the Divergents. (Wait… what?!) So,
Jeanine’s trying to find a Divergent powerful enough to pop her box, while Tris
and her fellow rogues attempt to elude capture long enough to amass an army of
their own.
And so breadcrumbs of predictable
narrative are parceled out one scrap at a time as the film blunders through
setpiece after setpiece , all of it in plain sight of the massive elephant in
the DIVERGENT series’ paste-white, empty room: a malnourished, under-developed
fictional world.
Sure, the jaded nerd in me could
have rattled off the same litany of smart aleck, buzz-killing snipes at
DIVERGENT…
(the entire human population looks
like it can’t be more than a few thousand people, 95% of whom are between the
ages of first-time-getting-to-second-base and able-to-rent-a-car.)
… But DIVERGENT did a lot more to
compensate for and bolster its (let’s face it: inevitable) dangling strands of
narrative illogic.
(They can mass produce organic tech, but still have to grow food.)
(They can mass produce organic tech, but still have to grow food.)
INSURGENT just looks
crappy, especially compared to Neil Burger’s visually sumptuous (at times
overwrought) DIVERGENT. The factions’ once-striking costume designs have lost
much of their color and stylistic flair (Caleb looks like a bleedin’ chimbley
sweep), while the new sets have a bland spaciousness that comes off more flimsy
cheap than future chic.
Apparently, this sequel had a
higher budget, but most of it appears to have been used to pay for both excessive
CGI (more runtime-padding, serum-induced simulations) and the parade of
talented actors who peek in for glorified cameos.
Octavia Spencer, Naomi Watts and
Daniel Dae Kim all stop by as various faction leaders to put a recognizable face to some meaningless
dialogue. While we’re talking actors (i.e., the best thing INSURGENT has going
for it), Shailene Woodley is as game as ever, bringing everything she can to a
Katniss-lite character whose only two moods are determined (because, dammit,
she’s Divergent!) and emotional
breakdown (because *sob sob* she’s *sniffle* Divergent!).
Both Teller and Elgort ham it up in opposite directions - Teller playing Peter as a somehow even cockier version of his character from THE SPECTACULAR NOW and Elgort making the most of Caleb’s slimy, spineless nebbish – resulting in a few of the film’s more entertaining moments.
Both Teller and Elgort ham it up in opposite directions - Teller playing Peter as a somehow even cockier version of his character from THE SPECTACULAR NOW and Elgort making the most of Caleb’s slimy, spineless nebbish – resulting in a few of the film’s more entertaining moments.
All of it is ultimately wasted as
the cast is chased from Amity to factionless to Candor and back. A brief melee
aboard a hurtling freight train provides the movie’s most compelling action
sequence before everything devolves back into endless running and gunfire.
It all finally wraps up in a laughable,
arbitrary revelation of Poochie’s-an-alien proportions.
Basically, THE DIVERGENT SERIES: INSURGENT boasts all of its prequel's fundamental stupidities…
(They have weapons capable of
firing cartridges full of any serum or poison imaginable, but also still rely
on bullets.)
…without any of its latent charm.
(1 ½ out of 4 Stars)
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