By Chris Withers

 
So Insurgent is supposed to be the middle of a story… except that it really isn’t. By the end the main villain is dead (spoiler), the big secret that is ridiculously easy to guess has been revealed, and everybody is happy with the exception of the dead villain. Insurgent is a movie that never really approaches interesting and is certainly not going to please anyone other than fans of the popular book series, by Veronica Roth.
The Divergent series is about a futuristic world separated into five classes, jocks, nerds, hippies, other hippies, and court judges. Our hero, Triss, was born a hippie but as it turns out she is capable of being all of them. She and her chunk of meat in the shape of male, named 4, prevented a plot by the nerds to take over and now must take revenge. The movie is mostly Triss and 4, initially with a few hanger ons both of whom are ditched by the 40-minute mark. The reason I bring this up is to illustrate the poor pacing of Insurgent.
Superfluous characters pop in and out of the story for no reason. Worse even is the story progression; our heroes are friends with Miles Teller (Peter), who is an obvious jerk who will betray them, and it takes 20 minutes for that to happen. The duo meet up with a factionless group and all agree, except for 4, that they will need to team up in order to beat the bad guy… and they don’t for another hour despite the fact that they need to team with them… an obvious fact that was already established.
The action scenes are at least mildly good. The actors all do decent jobs and the simulation scenes are pretty good, mostly because of the very expensive CGI. Most fans will say that the acting makes up for it, which is only half true. Shailene Woodley does a very admirable job, she’s swimming uphill though and she can’t save this trash. Everyone else is seriously underperforming, especially Miles Teller, who is hamming it so far up that it’s almost impossible to tell why people think that he’s supposedly a hot new commodity.
But ultimately it doesn’t matter; because it makes me feel like I don’t ever need to see the next one. This is the second film in the franchise, which is supposed to make me really excited for the finale, and this film does the exact opposite. Not just because I hated the movie, but also because it feels like the story is over now. While the next two movies will cover the human race reuniting with the rest of the human race it feels perfunctory. Hell, the main characters barely even mentioned being the last of the human race. They were obsessed with killing the bad guy, which they did, and making everyone love Divergents, which they now do, rather quickly in fact. So there really is no reason to see this, unless you really want to not need to see the next movie or whatever.
Rating 1/5