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The Divergent Series: Insurgent is essentially a dumb action movie, except with the traditional gender roles reversed. The hero is a woman. The villain is a woman. The ever-supportive eye candy is a dude. They kill a lot of people.
In the Divergent series, dystopian future Chicago is ruled by five factions, each defined by a personality trait. The second film in this series picks up where the first left off: Our hero, Tris (Shailene Woodley), is still reeling from the death of her mother (Ashley Judd), the destruction of her mother's faction and the near annihilation of her own faction at the hands of Jeanine (Kate Winslet), who leads Erudite, yet another faction. Tris, her boyfriend, Four (Theo James), her brother and the traitorous Peter are all fugitives, with Jeanine and her minions hot on their tail.
Tris has an aptitude for multiple factions and is therefore "divergent," which is bad. Why the factions want to eliminate divergents will never fully make sense. Jeanine found a Fifth Element-style puzzle box in the house of Tris' late mother and needs a divergent to unlock the five sides of it, which correspond to the factions. So the Erudites devise a tool that identifies a person's divergence. Guess who is 100 percent divergent. Many weapons don't work on divergents due to all their divergence. It's best not to think about any of this too hard.
The film is essentially one long fight with occasional scene changes—they're on a train! Rooftop gunfight! Fisticuffs in the hallway! The PTSD, haunting images of Tris' mother, a trial and most embarrassingly, Four's forced drama with his estranged mother provide brief breaks from the bloodshed. Director Robert Schwenke spends some time trying to develop this drama, or at least as much as any dumb action movie invests in character development. These quiet moments are a good opportunity to use the restroom.
It's probably good that the old "chick flick" has been abandoned, and that the success of The Hunger Games and the Divergent series proves that teenage girls like watching bloodshed, explosions and mayhem, too. This is at least as much a message as the one ham-fistedly stamped onto the end of the film: Don't kill people for being different. Good advice.
Critic's Grade: C-
SEE IT: The Divergent Series: Insurgent is rated PG-13. It opens Friday at most major Portland-area theaters.
WWeek 2015