Movie Review: The Divergent Series - Insurgent

Will the odds ever be in Shailene Woodley’s favour?

In 2011, prognosticators tipped up-and-comer Woodley to grab a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her work as George Clooney’s daughter in The Descendants. However, the Academy, that inscrutable, sphinxlike bunch, snubbed her unceremoniously, despite a year earlier hosting a coronation for another spunky young actress: Winter’s Bone breakout Jennifer Lawrence. You don’t need to be told how this narrative played out…

…but let’s cover it anyway.

Today, Lawrence has a Best Actress Oscar to her name (from three career nominations), as well as a starring role in The Hunger Games quadrilogy; I’ll say it: the best film series going.

Woodley, meanwhile, has Insurgent.

The 23-year-old Woodley hardly needs to cry into her pillow at night. Her humane performance in The Fault in Our Stars was instrumental in getting it to $306 million at the worldwide box office and she even earned a trio of MTV Movie Award nominations for her troubles. Next stop on the train of accolades less prestigious than the Oscars: the Spike Guys’ Choice Awards!

Still, she’s unfortunate enough to exist in the age of J-Law, to whom she lost the part of Katniss Everdeen before settling on the role of Tris Prior in The Divergent Series; the ultimate fallback franchise.

Based on Veronica Roth’s bestselling book – the second in a trilogy – Insurgent sees rebels Tris and Four (Theo James) on the run, having made high-powered enemies in the previous instalment by challenging their future-Chicago’s five-factioned society. (This ‘faction’ set-up of their dystopia is a whole thing. Please don’t make me explain it.) Also on the run are Tris’ brother Caleb and her frenemy Peter, played by Woodley’s former TFIOS and The Spectacular Now flames Ansel Elgort and Miles Teller, respectively (and confusingly).

They travel the city hoping to inspire insurgency (get it?), meeting up with the city’s peacekeepers, truthtellers and even their underground factionless, led by Four’s mother, Evelyn (Naomi Watts). All the while, ruthless head of the brainiac brigade, Jeanine (Kate Winslet), seeks to stamp out the uprising by kidnapping ‘divergents’ – like Tris – who share the traits of all five factions. Only they have the power to open up a mysterious cube containing a message that will… do something. Jeanine genuinely doesn’t know what, but has high hopes it will help her cause. Seems like a dumb strategy.

Director Robert Schwentke takes over for Neil Burger on this Divergent sequel, and despite a few filmmaking flourishes – like one notable Scorsese-inspired dolly zoom – there’s not much flavour to be found here. Fact is, not Schwentke nor his trio of screenwriters can differentiate this from, or elevate it above, other YA bites of the cherry like The Maze Runner or The Host (still the genre’s nadir, they'll be relieved to hear).

It’s not all bad. The younger cast struggles against the cliché-laden, characterless script, yet Winslet, Watts and Whiplash’s Miles Teller take the cheese and really chew on it. Woodley too does fine work, though her perpetually-furious Tris isn’t the funnest person to spend two hours with. She excels in the big finale, in which Tris submits to some CGI-simulated physical and spiritual trials with the hope of opening that darn cube, allowing Woodley the opportunity to flex some literal and emotional muscles for the first time in this otherwise dreary and uncomplicated film.

It gives me no pleasure to describe Woodley’s career unfavourably to that of Jennifer Lawrence, as if she’s the Young Adult world’s Salieri. However, there’s no way to watch Insurgent without remembering – with far greater fondness – the not six-months-old Mockingjay Part 1. Roth wrote Insurgent two years after Suzanne Collins’ very similarly themed Mockingjay, and though I wouldn’t accuse her of plagiarism (these are, after all, ancient topics in literature), the pictures inspired by her books certainly aren’t satisfying the hole left by Hunger Games hiatuses. Woodley, by association, can't help but feel lesser alongside it.

Or, maybe that’s why signing up for this sound-a-like saga was secretly a smart move. When you’re watching Insurgent, trying to quell the boredom, all you can think about is how much better Shailene is than the movie around her.

She’s only got two more of these things left. When both halves of concluding Divergent sequel Allegiant are finally behind her, perhaps we’ll see Shailene Woodley's true talents, emergent.

2/5

In cinemas March 19, 2015. Rated M for science fiction themes and violence.