Cast: The Divergent series wins the award for casting the right people just in time. Shailene Woodley again makes most of this movie work through sheer force of will. She's the kind of actor who makes up for a lot of other problems. It's almost not even worth mentioning the rest of the cast, given how completely she takes over the movie, but I will anyway. Theo James is tough and brooding. Ansel Elgort is very one dimensional. Miles Teller is criminally underused. Jai Courtney is more of an obstacle than a character/antagonist. Kate Winslet is delivering exactly the performance she's supposed to. Naomi Watts and Octavia Spencer give the movie some clout. Others like Zoe Kravitz come back, basically to link this back to the first movie.
Plot: Tris (Woodley) is still on the run, Woodley's cadre of on-screen boyfriends (James - Divergent, Teller - The Spectacular Now, Elgort - The Fault in Our Stars) in tow. The Erudites have assumed full covert control over the city (Is there a name for the city? I didn't catch one). She spends her time trying to get the other factions and non-factions to rebel. Meanwhile, Jeanine (Winslet), has a McGuffin, er, a box that has an important secret in it that for some reason, can only be opened by a divergent. Not just any divergent though: one that can pass a bunch of tests. Tests similar to the ones in the first movie, expect much more pixelated. A lot of jumping through glass and walls. The movie kind of lost me at some point. I got what was going on, but not really the point of any of it.
Elephant in the Room: How is this different from the other dystopia's out there? It's not. Somehow, Insurgent just made it all feel less plausible. The first movie was grounded in a lot of ways. It had a ground level view of things. This movie increased the scale tremendously, which only highlighted how silly this world is. If I stop to think about any one beat of the story for too long, I lose the thread of the plot completely and get bombarded with internal (or external) logic questions that come down to "how can such an smart society be so dumb?".
To Sum Things Up:
I'll watch more of these movies because I'll watch Shailene Woodley in just about anything (The same goes for Miles Teller as a scene-stealer). Pretty much everything else is a mess though. The story is muddled. The world isn't as well built as the first installment (you can really feel the change in directors). The effects are overdone (Please, no more of these virtual reality sequences). I'd really like to see a version of all this that doesn't feel like there's a checklist of young-adult dystopian tropes that had to be followed. I don't know how they did it, but I'm actually more excited for the Maze Runner sequel than another one of these movies.
Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend
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