THE DIVERGENT SERIES: INSURGENT (Robert Schwentke). 119 minutes. Opens Friday (March 20). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN
The second film in the Divergent series, Insurgent, is pretty much the same as the first one.
As before, Shailene Woodley‘s Tris Prior must stay ahead of her enemies in a post-apocalyptic Chicago divided into five factions. As before, she struggles to let the kind Four (Theo James) into her heart while looking out for her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) and scrapping with the dickish Peter (Miles Teller). And once again, she’s captured by the sinister Jeanine (Kate Winslet) and put through a series of visually elaborate hallucinations in order to determine something terribly important.
Taking over from Divergent director Neil Burger, Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, R.E.D.) moves things along a little faster and stays out of Woodley’s way. She’s easily the best thing about this franchise, even though she’s stuck playing a second-rate Katniss Everdeen, and her scenes with the mercurial Teller crackle with a playful tension absent everywhere else.
Plot-wise, Insurgent doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but that tracks back to Veronica Roth‘s books, which build an entire world around a fundamentally silly premise and just hope the reader won’t notice. It’s a lot harder to ignore that stuff in IMAX 3D.
