Insurgent (5.5/10)

For a long time, watching all the trailers that came out, I thought this movie was going to be cheesy and suffering from unrealistic CGI visuals. I thought this movie was going to be horrible.

Here's my biggest problem though. Shailene Woodley, one of the most talented  young actors working today, is either a wrong casting choice or her character just annoys me. If her character was supposed to be a strong and driven girl emotionally and mentally, I did not see it. In the first movie she could still be finding her way, but I wanted to see her stronger in this sequel. But Woodley's performance was still this whiny crybaby.

But if that's her character, then it's the right casting choice. It's this character that's so annoying to me that I just couldn't get behind her. And no matter how unfair it is, this will be compared with The Hunger Games and she to Jennifer Lawrence. And it's quite a gap.

Theo James was less stiff than in Divergent, just by a hair. But when these two got together to build some romantic connection, the dialogue was less than inspiring and, because Twilight has scarred me for life, the writing has to be better or these young adult romance are all cringe worthy.

Another problem that has become more apparent in this second movie was the lack of imagination for names. The protagonist, the one that's supposed to instill fear when her name's mentioned, is called Jeanine. The heroine is Beatrice. Her love interest who's supposed to be this badass protector of hers, is Tobias; his nickname Four isn't any better. And Jai Courtney's character is supposed to be this badass, devil may care guy and he's called Eric.

The only two guys I thought were good and elevated the scene were Ansel Elgort and Miles Teller. Elgort played such a perfect leading man in the romantic drama opposite Woodley in The Fault In Our Stars, and here he lent his talent just adequately and not stand out too much to play the "little brother" character.

Teller lighted up the screen whenever he came on and he made the lines sound less horrible than they actually were.

Kate Winslet and Mekhi Phifer played their roles well. But the big surprise to me was how this franchise is attracting Academy Award talents like Octavia Spencer and Naomi Watts. It's not like they are in need of work.

There were still a few scenes like in Divergent that just happened for the convenience of story development. Like how the Dauntless crew could just storm into Erudite's stronghold without anyone noticing, or that whole fight scene on the train and how three of them fought off like 20 Factionless members. Some were even killed and there were retaliation or consequences.

When it came to action sequences though, I thought Robert Schwentke directed them very well and they did stand out. But this story and this franchise is very quickly losing my interest and I think that's because Woodley and her character is very uninteresting.

I do hope the next two movies get better than this.