Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
Let’s get the positive out of the way right at the outset: the studio credits that open The Divergent Series: Insurgent look kind of cool, especially in 3D, tiny blue pixels floating like stars only to join together and form production logos. Now, about those other 117 minutes.
After the first film in the series, I thought the course correction needed was to enliven what was a genuinely stupid premise (a dystopian society fending off the blight beyond their walls through a faction system based on emotions) with some decent action sequences. But Insurgent proves that a film can address its problems and still manage to be worse, a bland mélange of nearly a dozen other movies that have come before it. Whereas the first was an uninspired blending of Hunger Games and Harry Potter, Insurgent takes the time to add beige takes on everything from The Matrix to The Village into the mix, leaving every sequence to feeling like a pale imitation.
We start out with Kate Winslet’s evil leader in search of a magic puzzle box that we had never heard of until the start of this film, a dumb Lament Configuration-style MacGuffin meant to end her war on the Divergents once and for all. But she needs a Divergent to open it, so she has to root out Tris (Shailene Woodley) and Four (Theo James) in order to uncover its secrets. Amidst this manhunt, we’re introduced to the Factionless (led by Naomi Watts) – the chain-smoking high school dropouts to the Divergent’s gifted and talented class-taking polymaths – who seek an alliance with Dauntless (a pack of feral bros whose fearlessness manifests itself through endlessly climbing scaffolding) in order to overthrow Erudite (smart, but in a Vulcan or Aspergery way). So it goes, an endless procession through the apocalyptic ruins of Chicago as we meet each faction immediately negating the movie’s central premise by embodying multiple ideals in each interaction.
Shailene Woodley was able to overcome the silliness surrounding her in Divergent but she’s buried by the material this time around. Particularly cringe-worthy is a sequence wherein she faces a tribunal under the effects of truth serum, punctuating her emotional outbursts with Shatnerian grimaces and howls of pain. Even worse is Kate Winslet, turning in what may be the worst performance of her career, saddled with inane dialogue filmed for maximum dramatic effect (Winslet crosses arms, camera pushes in , she utters “Bring me those very special ones” – all rather embarrassing). The only performer who comes out unscathed is Miles Teller, who enters every scene in a perpetual shrug, complicit with the audience in thinking how silly this whole thing is.
As embarrassing as a teenager’s LiveJournal and stupid enough to power a dozen more Transformers movies, Insurgent ends with a game-changing plot twist that makes everything somehow more imbecilic than it was before, no mean feat when considering the starting point. In true modern fashion, the finale is being broken into two pieces (here I thought the The Divergent Saga: Allegiant Part II barb in my original review was a sick burn instead of prophetic) and I’m morbidly curious to see just how farther afield this series can find itself with each subsequent installment. That said, I’d much rather see this talented group of performers spending their time on anything other than this paint-by-numbers saga, whose existence make the tween-oriented film adaptation market feel like its own dystopia in dire need of a chosen one to lead us out of this bland wasteland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suZcGoRLXkU
