Insurgent 3D, movie review: Shailene Woodley film is completely derivative but still enjoyable

(12A) Robert Schwentke, 115 mins, starring: Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Miles Teller, Ansel Elgort, Jai Courtney

Theo James and Shailene Woodley in Insurgent

If you get over its derivative feel and its strong resemblance to The Hunger Games, this teen movie sequel - the second of three parts - has plenty going for it.

The early scenes are very predictable. Doughty heroine Tris (Shailene Woodley), Tobias (Theo James) and their fellow rebels are on the run, hiding out from the wicked witch-like Jeanine (Kate Winslet) in rural isolation with the “Amity” community.

Where the film really picks up momentum is during its mind-bending, Altered States-like finale in which Tris takes a series of psychological, virtual reality tests which require her to show qualities of all the five factions - abnegation, candour, amity, dauntlessness and erudition.

Director Schwentke, taking over from Neil Burger, stages these hallucinatory scenes with a verve and visual imagination that rekindles memories of old Donald Cammell or Ken Russell movies. She is confronted with figures from her past and, at one stage, even has to tussle with her own doppelgänger.

As The Hunger Games and The Hobbit have shown, the middle film in a trilogy always tends to feel vaguely unsatisfactory - a staging post more than a destination in its own right - but at least Insurgent has very lively performances from Woodley as the action heroine, James as her square-jawed beau, Ansel Elgort (Woodley’s co-star from The Fault In Our Stars) as her detached Caleb and Miles Teller (from Whiplash) as the Iago-like Peter.