I’ll start off by saying that I enjoyed ‘Divergent’ even with all of its issues, it was an enjoyable action sci-fi film. As such, I was looking forward to ‘Insurgent’ hoping that it could improve on the concept and be overall, a better film. Unfortunately I was wrong, very wrong.

The first and second acts of ‘Insurgent’ are almost beat-for-beat ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1’ which needless to say is frustrating especially when ‘Divergent’ tried so hard to distance itself from that comparison. Now, I haven’t read the books, but if ‘Insurgent’ is close to the book then I have no idea how the books got published as these two are ridiculously similar, thematically, plot progression wise, everything.

The fact that I didn’t particularly like ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1’ and that ‘Insurgent’ is a shoddier version of that film should give you an idea about how I felt watching this film. I was bored throughout and never once did the film grip me to where I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.

The film isn’t all bad though, they changed the director since ‘Divergent’ and that definitely helped as although some of the shots are contrived and paint-by-numbers, it does have some very good shots and visuals. The new director definitely injected some life into a horrendously awful script but the film was nowhere near as flashy as it could have been.

I will say that the visuals for Beatrice’s final test were impressive and by far stood out as the only interesting part of an otherwise bland film. If you were to just watch that scene, you would assume that the film is full of visually gorgeous action scenes with real emotion and actual risk, unfortunately, you would be wrong. Besides Beatrice’s final test, every “action” scene was boring with no stakes, no visual flare and no excitement.

Shailene Woodley gives her absolute best in every film I have seen her in and that is no exception here, Woodley is giving the best she can with an awful script, trying to deliver the flattest dialogue imaginable and she succeeds more often than not. I am a huge fan of Miles Teller and I think he is a fantastic actor, but for some reason here, I wasn’t feeling his performance this time, not only due to the dialogue but because his plot “arc” is so formulaic, even the best actor could just switch on auto-pilot for the role. That is one of the biggest problem I had with the film though, Teller and Woodley have always had fantastic on-screen chemistry and this horrendous script took that away from them and the film suffered for it.

Also, it could just be me, but I think that the scores for ‘Insurgent’ sound eerily similar to any of the ‘Hunger Games’ scores, even though it is different composers as far as I know.

The whole film felt like ‘Hunger Games’ lite with literally zero originality throughout the entire two hour film. Frankly, I find it very offensive that the film-makers take their audience for gullible bags of money, thinking that they can shove this piece of shit out knowing that someone copied the ‘Mockingjay’ script and changed the names and said, “Yeah, that’s good enough”.

At the end of ‘Divergent’, I was anticipating the sequel, at the end of ‘Insurgent’, I dreaded the sequel. That sentiment pretty much sums up my feelings about ‘Insurgent’.

4/10