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Review: Insurgent

Second film in the dystopian series starts slow and never quite takes off.

I confess it took me a little while to get my bearings during Insurgent. I had more or less liked its predecessor, Divergent—based on the first book in Veronica Roth’s YA trilogy (which I haven’t read)—and saw it as a nice teen dystopia place-filler between Hunger Game films. In particular, I had appreciated Shailene Woodley’s laidback approach to action stardom (she seemed like the action heroine most likely to stop mid-chase to roll a blunt). But as Insurgent started, I suddenly realized that I was supposed to have retained some of that stuff from the first film. Ruh ro.

Okay, so I vaguely remembered a few things: that in the film’s post-apocalyptic universe, people were grouped by personality type, and that those groups had funny-sounding names: Candor, Dauntless, Erudite, Amity, and Abnegation (although the exact distinction between Amity and Abnegation still eluded me). I also remembered that Woodley’s Tris was a rare hybrid called a “Divergent” who somehow fit into all five groups. Divergents were seen as a threat to the oligarchy, headed by a stoic Kate Winslet in dystopian pantsuits, and as such, Tris and her hunky Dauntless beau Four (Theo James) were on the run. Also, somehow Tris feels responsible for the death of her saintly parents and a bunch of other deaths that weren’t actually her fault. As for the status of Tris and Four’s relationship (they’re totally doing it!), the trustworthiness of Tris’s Erudite brother Caleb (not 100-percent trustworthy!), and what Tris’s ultimate endgame is—I eventually sorted those things out.

But I spent the first part of Insurgent—when the gang was hiding out in Amity—alternating between slight confusion and slight boredom. It didn’t help that Theo James’s acting was as stiff and motionless as his perfectly chiseled jaw and that the far more charismatic Miles Teller was right there as an opportunistic Dauntless who seems to always be in Tris’s path. Indeed, Insurgent has what I’ll call “Overqualified Costar Syndrome.” It’s hard to be super interested in the antics of Tris and Four and Ansel Elgort’s Caleb when we’ve got Kate Winslet’s Jeanine, Octavia Spencer as the tougher-than-she-looks head of Amity, and a brunette (!) Naomi Watts as Four’s long-lost, rabble-rousing mother.

Eventually, the action kicks in—Jeanine possesses a special box passed down from the elders that she believes contains all the secrets to controlling the universe, but she needs a Divergent to open it—and things get a little more exciting. But that leads to Insurgent‘s other big problem: At least half the action isn’t real action at all—but virtual action, a kind of video game of the mind. It looks cool but it was hard to be on the edge of my seat about whether or not Tris is going to save her mother (Ashley Judd) from a catapulted burning house, when I knew that the whole thing was in her imagination.

In the end, Insurgent was watchable enough, but it didn’t do enough to get me reinvested in the series. Also? The film gives us what at least appears to be closure. They could’ve ended the franchise here and I would’ve been none the wiser. At least this time I took copious notes, so when the next film comes around, I’ll be ready.