“Insurgent” is Worse Than “Divergent,” Which Sucked [Review]

I spent the entire movie staring at Shailene Woodley’s nose. Her nostrils are huge and weirdly shaped. Very distracting.

Shailene Woodley…seriously, look at that schnoz

Anyway, Insurgent is the sequel to Divergent, the movie that’s supposed to remind us of Hunger Games, only not as good. Insurgent is set in a future Chicago where everyone is divided up into factions like the whole world is a high school cafeteria, and everyone sticks to their own cliques. All the factions have names no one but English majors would ever use like Abnegation and Candor, and none of them seem like factions anyone would willingly want to be a part of. I mean, seriously. “Abnegation” members have to live in houses with very little light, eat plain vegetables with no seasoning, and serve others all their life. “Dauntless” members have to run around all day whooping, jumping onto moving trains, and doing suicidal stunts. “Amity” members have to spend all their time growing food in farms, and take a drug in their food to keep them from being violent. Who wants that? Where’s the faction that sits around watching TV and eating pizza all day? But I digress.

Once again, Tris (Shailene Woodley) is a special snowflake because she’s a divergent. That means she has traits of all the different factions. I guess. But she doesn’t act any different than anyone else, and doesn’t seem any smarter or more skilled than anyone else, so she doesn’t seem that special to me.

The problem with this movie is the same as the last one, only more so. Most of the “action” in this movie just involved virtual simulations, which have zero tension, because it’s like watching a hallucinogenic dream. Yeah, yeah, if you die in the dream, you die in real life. Well, we know she’s not going to die because they have two more sequels to get through, so that’s not a concern. You spend half the movie watching her flying around and seeing dead people and waiting for something to actually happen.

The rest of the movie is people standing around talking and arguing, and I can’t even remember most of it. It’s just endless bickering with different factions, and behind it all, the topless chick from “Titanic”…I mean, Kate Winslet is trying to get Tris so she can unlock a special box to find the secrets of the universe or whatever. But a lot of it felt like padding, killing time to save some story for the sequels.

The twist in the end ruined the movie. Without giving it away, basically, the movie says, “Yeah, the faction system makes no sense on its own. Here’s the real reason it exists.” Since the first movie was all about Tris getting into and struggling with the faction system, this makes the entire last movie a waste of time.

I haven’t seen her in anything else, but in this movie, Shailene Woodley is a bad actress. Most of the movie has her with a “deer in the headlights” look of fear and confusion. Unlike Jennifer Lawrence in Hunger Games, Shailene’s fight scenes are completely unconvincing. She punches like she’s swinging a mile away from people, and she practically flinches every time she shoots a gun. At no time did I believe she was actually good at combat.

This is absolutely not a real boxing stance

Even my wife, who loved Divergent, didn’t like this movie. She didn’t even bother to watch the third one.

There will be no review of Allegiant, because the only way I’ll watch it is if you drag me to the TV with rusty hooks in my nose. I seriously can’t believe enough people read these books to make them bestsellers.

What did you think of the Divergent series? Would you ever watch it?

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