Skip to main content

On "Just Don't Give a Fuck" Mode

If there's a few good things I can say about The Divergent Series: Allegiant, they are the following:


  1. I only have to play "Name That Sci-Fi Film Reference!" once, because this installment of this stale Hunger Games-knockoff really only borrows from another slightly better dystopain sci-fi series in the form of Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials.
  2. Miles Teller really is the best part of this whole movie. You can see how much he does not want to be apart of this series, and each time he speaks, the disdain comes comes through loud and clear. He knows this is a waste of his talents and his time, and he allows the audience in on the joke. 
Besides that, though? Allegiant is bad. It's legitimately bad, in addition to being even duller affair to sit through than the first two, which is saying something. After the revelation that Chicago was one big experiment in order to help repopulate the world and the destruction of the faction system, the city of Chicago is on the verge of civil war between followers of Johanna and Evelyn, one again played by Octavia Spencer and Naomi Watts, respectively. Oh, yeah, I forgot to say this is hours after the second movie takes place. Really. Evelyn, leader of Factionless, has killed off Jeannine (which we saw at the end of the second movie) and has manned soldiers at the wall itself, making sure people don't try to escape. Again, this is not even a full 24 hours after the events of the second film. And now, there's a civil war between the remaining factions of Chi-town and Factionless. Say with me now: Bullshit!! And if you think that's a big flub, take a look at Tris Prior's haircut, before & after:


Before...
...and after
That's right: the movie is so goddamn lazy that they couldn't bother to keep the actress's hair style consistent. And again, and I can't stress this enough, this is all supposedly hours after Insurgent. Jesus, if director Robert Schwentke's lack of continuity and plausibility was this bad, no wonder she, Four (Theo James), Christina (Zoe Kravitz), her brother Caleb (Ansel Egort) and Milles Teller escape the Windy City...even-though there were supposedly soldiers manning the wall at all times. Oh, and why are Tris and the gang dragging Miles Teller along? Last time, he helped Jeannine use mind-control to make people commit suicide in order to draw her out. Why would they think this unrepentant rat bastard would turn a new leaf? Wouldn't it be wiser to leave this little shit back in Chicago and leave him to his own fate? And if you guessed that he sells out his compadres again in this movie, congratulations; you've spotted out how incredibly lazy the writing is and how little characterization there is as well.

The gang's wonder at what they'll see over the Wall becomes a nightmare, as they find themselves staring at dodgy visual effects and several monotonous minutes of them walking across a rejected look of an apocalyptic wasteland from Mad Max: Fury Road. They eventually are taken in by David, the leader of the Bureau for Genetic Welfare, an organization dedicated to studying the last pockets of human civilization in order to.....I dunno, save humanity or some shit? He's also played by Jeff Daniels, who tries to lend this movie some measure of gravitas, but all he does is spend his time doing three things: 1.) spouting line after line of exposition explaining what happened to the word and what their mission statement is, 2.) spouting sci-fi techno-babble bullshit nonsense, and 3.) being the primary wolf in sheep's clothing. Yes, Daniels is the villain, and if you thought the faction system died with Kate Winslet's tyrannical matriarch antagonist, the joke's on you, because this Bureau is basically another system of putting people into factions, deeming who is "genetically pure" and who is "genetically damaged".

Remember when I said I'd be playing the "Name That Sci-Fi Film Reference" only once? I lied, because this movie not only borrows from the main plot of The Scorch Trials, but the theme of determining who is pure and who is not is also taken from Harry Potter, both book and film series. Oh, and the scientific organization/burreacracy-turned totalitarian regime trying to suppress others or an entire group of people and/or commit genocide? Ideas lifted from Equilibrium and Ultraviolet. When you're lifting ideas from that incompetent hack, you know the franchise has run out of ideas. If it sounds like this review is on 'I don't give a flying fuck!' mode, that's only because the movie's on the same wavelength. No one cares at this point about this franchise, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear from its stars like Shaileen Woodley and Miles Teller say that making these films made them go back into the indie scene, swearing off tentpole features. Speaking of the former, Woodley, who's carried the first two films on her shoulders, seems to have given up herself and just decided to cash in her check. Before, it was interesting to see her play this young woman who's coming into her own and trying to stay alive in this dystopian nightmare, but that pull and aurora she gave off on Tris Prior is long gone by the end of this movie. The other younger actors - from Egort and James to Teller and Kravitz - are stuck playing one-note characters, though Teller at least knows how shit the script and this series is, and just milks how much disdain he has for being suckered into this mess; while seasoned character actors like Spencer, Watts and Daniels aren't given enough to do and basically phone in their performances, as if they're all waiting for better roles to come along.

Unfortunately, this isn't the end of the series (though after sitting through this tired, pointless crap, you'll wish it were the end), because Summit Entertainment, like most studios these days, decided to split Veronica Roth's book into two halves, milking the udders dry to maximize profits, no matter how pointless and unnecessary it is. So in 2017, we've got the finale to the Divergent series, in the form of Ascendant, but frankly, I'm done with this series. It doesn't make sense, it borrows from other better literary and film works, and it doesn't really have anything to say, except that that they're trying to stake their claim in the YA-film adaptation market, which frankly, needs to wither away and die at this point. Harry Potter and The Hunger Games were terrific to above-average movies which resonated with audiences and had terrific production value, solid writing, a superb ensemble cast and direction that only got better as their respective series' went on. The Divergent Series, by contrast, doesn't have any of those qualities the two previous series share, and it's obvious that it never will.

* star out of ****

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

On Dynasties, Ignorance, and Moving Foreward To the Future.

In the beginning, I wanted Mr. Brown Verses to be a blog about movies, and that's it. Given how there's much more going on, like film analysis and how it relates to issues both here in America and beyond our borders; the annual predictions on the Academy Awards race; the state of the film industry; issues of ethnicity and gender roles in the business; the continued rise of fandom with both sexes; etc - it would be foolish to not  talk about it and just sticking with reviewing movies. Most of this has been hesitance on my end because I personally feel that I'm not as well-versed in the film medium to really speak on trends and whatnot. There are other, more eloquent critics and readers of the Award-season tea leaves that express these concepts so damn well, it's almost amazing they haven't been picked up by publishers like Entertainment Weekly or Rolling Stone or The New York Times, but I guess the idea that they stand apart makes their work more fearless, more rich

Cowardice

I was looking forward to watching the James Franco/Seth Rogen comedy The Interview  on Christmas Day, even more so than Angelina Jolie's WWII drama Unbroken , or Rob Marshall's Into the Woods . I like what the writing and directing duo of Rogen and his pal Evan Goldberg have done with comedies like Superbad , Pineapple Express and their debut feature, This Is the End . In light of Sony being hacked (which now appears to be North Korea's doing) and threats of attacking theaters that carry the comedy, three things happened today: 1.) Every major theater chain - AMC, Regal, Cinemark, Arclight, etc, had decided to pull out from showing The Interview  on its scheduled release date. 2.)  This prompted Sony Pictures to basically cancel the release date of the film amid threats of blowing up theaters. 3.)  Both Sony and the theater chains basically caved into the demands of cyber terrorism from North Korea. Are you fucking kidding me? We just caved into terrorist d

Mr. Brown Verses Battleship (Or: Michael Bay's Poisonous Influence On Modern Day Action/Blockbuster Movies)

Eventually, I am going to get to reviewing a movie that I actually liked, because I don't just want to be be bitching about terrible movies from the past and from the present In fact, there are two really great movies i'll be reviewing within the next week ( The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Master ) that I think rank among the year's best; add to that the release of Ben Affleck's international thriller Argo , and you'll be seeing a weekend's worth of praise of movies from me, including my picks for the best movies i've seen thusfar. Now, before I tear into the latest review on the sci-fi action picture, Battleship , I need to give this movie some background; not as much on the board game that inspired this bloated and boring piece of crap, mind you, but rather, the director who's trademarks are all over this mess of a film: Michael Bay. See, back in 1998, Bay released a little movie that joined together an unholy union of the Dirty Dozen, the