I wanted to love this movie but did not. I admired it, enjoyed it, will certainly recommend it to you. But love is too big a word.
Tom Hiddleston plays country music legend Hank Williams, who died in 1953 at the age of just 29, leaving behind dozens of songs that are still iconic -- “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Move It on Over,” etc. He died long enough ago, right at the start of the information age, that he seemingly belongs to a different epoch, sliding in somewhere between history and mythology.
“I Saw the Light” was written and directed by Marc Abraham, a longtime producer who directed one other feature, the overlooked 2008 drama, “Flash of Genius.” It’s based on a biography by Colin Escott, George Merritt and William MacEwen.
The film adaptation lands as a fairly conventional music star bio, charting Williams’ slow rise to fame and gradual decline due to ill health, poor choices and barrels full of alcohol.
Parts of the story are very strong, others less so, but we’ve seen it all before -- the boozin’ and druggin’, stretches laid up in a hospital bed, the birddogging with a revolving door of beautiful young women, while the resentful wife back home complains about how he’s always on the road singing for their supper.
I did learn a few things about Williams I didn’t know before, like that he had spina bifida, causing lifelong pain that spurred him toward drink. Or that, at the height of his fame, he recorded under the pseudonym of Luke the Drifter, a fictional half-brother, spouting pastoral recitations about life and loss. They didn’t sell very well, but he did it just because it gave him an outlet for thoughts he couldn’t express in his honkytonking tunes.
Hiddlesston is very fine in the role, and I’m sure he will get some consideration when the next awards season rolls around. He plays Williams as a man who is simultaneously very self-aware and a mystery to himself. He does the things he does because it’s the way he was made, even if it causes himself and others pain. He was the man who smiled at everybody and sang about tragedy and heartbreak.
“I show it to them. So then they don’t have to take it home,” he grudgingly explains to a mystified reporter.
The actor sounds really, really good singing in the movie. I’m not sure how much he sounds like Hank Williams. Not enough twang and moan to pass as authentically hillbilly. Hiddleston is a Brit, after all, and even Americans north of the Mason-Dixon line struggle with the Southern sound. But I believed him as somebody people would pay money to hear.
Elizabeth Olsen plays Audrey Williams, his first wife and manager, and she’s anything but the usual wallflower. She’s depicted as tough, smart, self-preserving, edging into domineering. Audrey wanted her own singing career but didn’t have the pipes -- “She sounds like a damn billy goat!” is how one heckler puts it -- and blames him for not helping her along. They cause each other plenty of strife, and at some point she checks out emotionally. We can’t really blame her.
The film’s biggest misstep is to break up the story with supposed archival interviews of actual figures in Williams’ life, like producer Fred Rose (Bradley Whitford). Abraham tries to employ this as a tool to relay the expository stuff as seamlessly as possible. But it still comes across as a lame “Behind the Music” knockoff.
“I Saw the Light” is a solid biography, but it doesn’t really stand out from the pack. Like “Ray” and “Walk the Line,” the film is good at capturing the essence of an artist but has trouble bending a big, untidy life into a straight narrative line.
An oddly moving portrait of an artist, “Marguerite” is about a famous singer who cannot sing.
Because she is wealthy and titled, 1920s French society has politely applauded Baroness Marguerite Dumont at drawing room recitals and private performances for years, while they snicker into their brocaded gloves. Thus, she has no awareness of her utter lack of talent.
In the opening sequence, director Xavier Giannoli, who co-wrote the script with Marcia Romano, shows us a talented young opera singer, Hazel (Christa Theret), who has been hired as a warm-up act for Lady Dumont’s performance. She is astonished at the pomp and circumstance, the fine musicians hired, the elaborate costumes and whatnot. Marguerite makes a grand entrance, opens her mouth, and…
How bad is she? Imagine a caterwauling ostrich… an untalented ostrich.
The filmmakers usher us into Marguerite’s cloistered world, and show us how such an elaborate delusion can sustain itself. Marguerite (Catherine Frot) is frumpy, fiftysomething, rather dim. But she loves opera more than anyone alive, collecting rare scores, lavishing her money upon artists, practicing hours every day.
The strange power of this movie is that it shows us someone so laughable, so ridiculous, and then shows us the grace inside her soul. Marguerite may not have a speck of talent, she may be vainglorious and pretentious, but there is a kind of purity to her devotion to something she will never attain.
"Perfection is not about doing a great and beautiful deed. It's doing what one does with greatness and beauty,” intones her devoted manservant, Madelbos (an excellent Denis Mpunga).
He should know, having served Marguerite for years, acting as her shield against any unkind words. Madelbos may fight against the truth, but he is not ignorant of it – he hands out wads of cotton for the servants to stuff their eyes during her practices. He’s part Svengali, part facilitator, even taking risqué photos of Marguerite costumed for famous roles.
Meanwhile, her husband Georges (André Marcon) sustains a poisonous love/hate relationship with Marguerite. He married her for her money, and is completely mortified by what her singing does to his status, but cannot bring himself to level with her.
Instead, he finds ways to be absent, physically and emotionally, from her life. This includes a temperamental sports car that tends to break down, leaving him stranded before her performances. (Assisted by a little of his own sabotage when called upon.) One senses he only bought the car as a way to excuse himself.
Sylvain Dieuaide plays Lucien Beaumont, a young writer and art critic who sneaks into Marguerite’s recital and writes a mocking review dressed up in flowery vagaries. She mistakes this for flattery and seeks him out to thank him, initiating a friendship built upon deceit that somehow flourishes into something genuine.
Michel Fau is a hoot as Pezzini, an aging peacock of an opera singer brought in to teach Marguerite and prep her for a big public recital. His expression when she begins her audition is one for the ages. Teetering upon financial ruin, he constantly wavers in the choice between retaining the Lady’s generosity or his artistic reputation.
Frot is divine in the lead role, radiating loneliness and need. She continually brings the character up to the edge of seeming realization, then backs her into the mist of lies that surrounds her like a spiritual aura. Not surprisingly, she won the French equivalent of the Oscar for her performance.
The film is an eclectic mix of seriousness and silliness – the latter including a training montage, accompanied by jumpy music, which could’ve come straight out of a “Rocky” movie.
It’s far from perfect; the movie doesn’t seem to know what to do with the Hazel character, eschewing the obvious “All About Eve” scenario, and opts to misplace her for the middle.
But “Marguerite” raises subtle, scratchy questions about the relationship between art and artist, wife and husband, patron and beneficiary. Is it better to be a successful fraud or a ridiculed true believer? Perfection can take many forms.
"Some Came Running" is one of those films that seemed to have the pedigree for sure success. After "From Here to Eternity" revived Frank Sinatra's Hollywood career, with an Oscar win for his supporting performance in the adaptation of James Jones' hit debut novel, they re-teamed the author and actor.
It was a pretty common thing back in that era. If a film clicked, studios were happy to order up another version utilizing the same actors, writers, directors -- even stories so similar they were a virtual remake.
In some ways "Running" is an unofficial sequel to "Eternity," about a soldier who comes home after the war and has trouble fitting in with his hometown and family. Although here Sinatra isn't playing his hotheaded character from "Eternity," but something closer to Montgomery Clift's remote loner.
It's an interesting picture in several ways, but overall it's rather draggy and narratively discombobulated. At 2½ hours it unsuccessfully tried to cram too much of the book into the movie. (Arthur Sheekman and John Patrick wrote the script.) Which isn't surprising, given that Jones' sprawling novel tipped the scales in excess of 1,200 pages.
(Jones was not known for brevity. "Eternity" was 864 pages, depending on the printing; "The Thin Red Line," which has twice been adapted to the screen, was a relatively spare 510 pages.)
Sinatra plays Dave Hirsh, who just got out of the Army and wakes up on a bus as it's arriving in his hometown of Parkman, Indiana. (The city is fictional; the film was shot almost entirely in picturesque Madison.) He had no intention of going there, but won $5,500 in a high-stakes card game in Chicago that ended in violence. To save his skin, Dave's buddies put him on the bus, the voucher for the dough safely nestled in the crotch of his pants.
It's his first time home in 16 years. A lot has happened to Dave in those years, but Parkman hasn't changed at all.
It's still a seemingly idyllic place, with the town fathers organizing a huge Centennial celebration to mark the founding, but with a seedy underbelly poorly concealed. The teens dress and talk nice but drink and fool around; the local gossips can spread information about each other (true or not) faster than buzzing bees; Dave's brother Frank appears to be an upstanding businessman but struggles with a sham marriage and an attraction to his young assistant.
Dave and Frank don't get along. When their parents died Frank, who's quite a bit older, didn't want Dave messing up his impending marriage and placed him in a boarding school for charity orphans. Dave grew up rough, traveled around doing odd jobs, and made something of a name for himself as a writer, penning two books that were critical if not commercial successes. These included characterizations some felt were thinly disguised versions of town residents -- including Frank's shrew wife (Leora Dana).
So he returns to Parkman as something of a combination of the town's black sheep and conquering hero.
Played by the great character actor Arthur Kennedy, Frank doesn't quite know what to do about Dave's return. A glad-hander and smooth talker, Frank inherited his bustling jewelry store from his father-in-law, using it as the first of many stepping stones to respectability. One could easily imagine him running for mayor in another 10 years.
He's quite put out that Dave promptly deposited his poker winnings in "the other bank," aka not the one on whose board Frank was recently appointed. This was a deliberate act to needle his big brother -- though I'm a bit unclear on how Dave knows about Frank's doings. Anyway, the siblings quickly take to bickering, then non-communication.
Dave does fall in with some new people, though. He's annoyed at being forced into a dinner with Professor French (Larry Gates) and his daughter, Gwen (Martha Hyer), who's a high school English teacher and literary critic. Both Gwen and Dave smell an obvious set-up, trying to pair up the prodigal son with the old maid.
But in that way that only happens in movies, the two meet, clash, and within a day have decided they are irrevocably in love.
Or... not so much. Fouling up the works is Ginny Moorehead, an idiotic floozy whom Dave met in Chicago on the night he left. Apparently he charmed her, convinced her to join him, then promptly forgot all about her in his boozy blackout. He gives her money to return, but Ginny decides she's smitten and decides to hang around Parkman, quickly securing a job at a factory and a reputation around town.
An old boyfriend (Steve Peck) follows her, following Dave, stirring up trouble.
Ginny was one of Shirley MacLaine's earliest roles and the one that earned her first Oscar nomination. She's a compelling but cloying figure, dumb as a brick and always struggling to catch up with the whip-smart Dave. He tries everything he can to get rid of her, but eventually succumbs to her modest charms, setting up a love triangle.
Normally in this kind of movie the wayward hero eventually lays aside the bad habits -- drinking, gambling, self-doubt -- that are personified by Ginny and turns to a figure like Gwen who inspires his nobler instincts. Gwen even dusts off one of Dave's old stories and has it published in The Atlantic, reviving his prospects as a writer.
But that doesn't happen here. Gwen is mortified by Dave's exploits turning up in the local paper and chatter. When Ginny shows up in her classroom offering to step aside for the sake of Dave's happiness, Gwen is shocked to discover the man she loves associating with a dimwitted trollop. She promptly gives Dave the boot, and in one of his drunken binges offers to marry Ginny, which she joyfully accepts.
Dean Martin also turns up as Bama Dillert, a professional card player who befriends Dave and invites him to join in his traveling game of poker, making the tour to Indianapolis, Terre Haute and the like. It's a quintessential Dean role, a hard-drinking con man who never removes his garish hat and lives by his own internal moral code.
Bama is a charmer because he never tries to charm anyone, offering take-it-or-leave-it friendship to Dave and dismissing as "pigs" any woman who would tie him down -- which as far as he is concerned is just about all of them.
It was the first onscreen pairing of Sinatra and Martin, and more or less marked the start of the Rat Pack pictures. As much as I enjoyed Martin as Bama, his character is a prime candidate for culling in the adaption process. The same goes for Dave's niece, Dawn (Betty Lou Keim), who has many of the same problems with her father as Dave does, and starts to act out. Similar sentiments for Nancy Gates as Edith Barclay, Frank's employee and seductee, who should also have been written out.
Sinatra earned some of the best notices of his career for this performance, but I'm not a fan. He was not a particularly contemplative actor who could show you what's going on inside the character's head, and Dave's journey happens mostly on the interior. I can't help but think what a Brando or Montgomery Clift could have done with this part.
Director Vincente Minnelli doesn't help him out with paucity of close-up shots to help us see the turmoil. Perhaps his mind was more on "Gigi," which came out the same year and earned him the Academy Award for direction.
Minnelli seemed mostly interested in making the most of the film's CinemaScope visuals, with lush colors and complex camera techniques. The final sequence of the Centennial celebration, as Dave and Ginny are tracked as they walk through the crowd while being stalked by her Chicago beau, is reminiscent of the opening scene of "Touch of Evil," also from 1958. It's often cited by filmmakers and historians, including Martin Scorsese and Peter Bodanovich, as a watershed bit of cinematography. (William H. Daniels deserves some of the credit.)
Perhaps the decision to keep the camera farther away from the lead actor was intentional given the picture's romantic ambitions. I've written about this before, but physically Sinatra was the human equivalent of a "20-foot car." That's a vehicle that looks great far away or medium distance, but its dings and nicks show up more glaringly the closer you step to.
With his multiple scars, deformed ear and acne-pitted cheeks, Sinatra was no longer the baby-faced crooner who made the girls swoon. His hairline was rapidly fleeing, and despite the use of concealing makeup his balding crown shines prominently in many of the shots. By the following year he'd successfully transitioned into toupee acting.
Since I was often bored during the movie, I wondered exactly how old the character of Dave was supposed to be. Both Sinatra and Kennedy were in their early 40s when the movie was made, so the idea of one brother being significantly older doesn't hold much air. My guess is Dave is around 30, but with Sinatra's creaky looks and stiff acting he seems closer to 50.
"Some Came Running" the book was savaged by critics, though the movie fared better -- more than it deserved, I deem.
“The Hateful Eight” struck many observers as a sharp departure for writer/director Quentin Tarantino, who tends to love freewheeling stories with lots of locations, walk-on bit characters and sudden twists of the plot. “Eight” was essentially a bunch of strangers stuck in a single room for three hours, the tension slowly ratcheting up.
(The blood, however, pools much more quickly.)
But in a lot of ways it’s a return to the form of “Reservoir Dogs,” Tarantino’s first feature film, which relied heavily on enclosed spaces in which violent characters try to make sense of shifting loyalties.
It’s not quite in the top tier of Tarantino films, like “Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.” But it firmly belongs in that second rank, along with “Django Unchained,” boasting plenty of entertaining face-offs and spouted soliloquies. For a three-hours picture, it goes by pretty quick.
The set-up is simple. Eight (for now) people are trapped by a terrible blizzard in a remote Wyoming cabin sometime in the years after the Civil War. They struggle to figure out who is not who they say, who’s loyal to who, and who deserves to be gunned down.
Answer to that last question: all of them, for one reason or another.
They include an infamous bounty hunter who always brings his quarry in alive (Kurt Russell); his current “client,” a foul-mouthed lady gangster (Jennifer Jason Leigh); a proud and decrepit ex-Confederate general (Bruce Dern) searching for his lost son; a black Union officer who’s also turned to the bounty hunting game (Samuel L. Jackson); a former rebel raider who claims to be the new sheriff at the closest town (Walton Goggins); a prissy British hangman (Tim Roth); a near-silent cow puncher (Michael Madsen); and Bob (Demián Bichir), a mysterious Mexican almost completely hidden by his coat, hat and beard.
Various alliances form, natural and otherwise, then break apart. The bounty hunters have an easy affinity for each other, and those on the side of the Confederacy soon square off against the Union loyalists.
Each character gets at least one moment where they step to the fore of the rhetorical stage, but there’s no single protagonist. Perhaps closest is Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren, who gives a long speech that’s notable for both its righteous anger at the injustice of slavery and the absolutely filthy way he goes about gaining some small measure of revenge for it.
“The Hateful Eight” is a long, blood-soaked but engaging dance through Western tropes.
Oh, and don’t forget to keep an ear out for Ennio Morricone’s Oscar-winning musical score.
Bonus features are nothing to brag about. Tarantino is among a number of high-profile filmmakers who are disdainful of participating in promotional material. (Despite the mountains of press they do when their movie is coming out.)
There are exactly two featurettes: “Beyond the Eight: A Behind-the-Scenes Look” and “Sam Jackson’s Guide to Glorious 70mm.”
Ironically, the best thing about "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" is the part that first drew fanboys' wrath.
Ben Affleck is brooding and magnetic in the nth iteration of Batman, playing a Bruce Wayne who's grayer and grimmer than we've seen before. His dark knight has been at it for decades, is worn around the edges, harbors grave doubts about whether his vigilantism has had any lasting positive effect on Gotham City. But he keeps plying away at it because he simply doesn't know any other life.
And Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman is a hoot, showing up late in the going to bring a welcome muscular female presence to the superhero game.
What's wrong is... well, just about everything else.
This is a hot, hot mess of a movie. It's overstuffed with CGI light shows, incomprehensible hand-to-hand fight scenes, extraneous characters and a giggling head villain who seems like the filmmakers are trying to channel a diluted version of the Joker.
The entire premise, captured in the title, is that the DC Comics universe's two greatest heroes are on a fatal collision course, when of course we know they're just going to wind up joining forces in the end.
(No spoilers here; the trailer shows as much.)
This is basically an "Avengers" origin story, as we lay the foundation for the formation of the Justice League. Aquaman, the Flash and Cyborg are all briefly glimpsed as part of the hidden community of "meta humans." You may recall the boys tussled quite a bit in the first "Avengers" flick before laying aside their beefs; this one just draws that portion out a little further.
I'm not going to get bogged down in an argument about which comics pantheon of heroes is better, Marvel or DC. (It's Marvel.) But the Marvel folks carefully planned out their cinematic adaptation, taking years and multiple solo movies with individual heroes to lay the groundwork.
Director Zach Snyder, who also helmed 2013's "Man of Steel" reboot of Superman starring Henry Cavill, feels like a lone wolf freelancing as he goes. Somewhere in the past there was a pitch meeting in which the studio was sold on the idea of Batman and Superman fighting. Then screenwriters Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer were told, "Go find a way to make it happen."
And what does happen isn't terribly convincing. The idea is that thousands of people died in the epic throwdown between Superman and General Zod, so Bruce Wayne comes to view him as a threat that must be eliminated. He's constantly tinkering down in his Batcave, tiredly jousting with loyal butler/major domo Alfred (Jeremy Irons, utterly wasted), coming up with new contingencies.
Meanwhile, Lex Luthor has been reimagined as a sniggering Zuckerberg-style boy billionaire, gleefully mucking around with other people's lives. He's played by Zuckerberg's cinematic alter-ego, Jesse Eisenberg, doing that pinched-voice, hyper-fast talking, neurotic thing he does. He's tracked down some kryptonite, and not only is he determined to use it to kill Superman, he's manipulating Bats into doing it for him.
Superman, who was kind of a drab bore in his own movie, fares even worse when he's splitting the screen time. He comes across as a detached demigod, willing to serve as mankind's savior but not terribly thrilled about it. Cavill is often asked to just stand there and react as other more interesting characters tell him what he should be thinking or doing.
Amy Adams, as reporter/love interest Lois Lane, is summoned back to damsel herself into some distress whenever things slow down too much.
I admit, after decades of Superman lore the one thing I still don't get is the Clark Kent alter ego. He really doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose. As Kevin Smith noted in "Clerks" so many years ago, Superman is who he really is, and Clark is the disguise. Every minute he spends in the newsroom of the Daily Planet, bickering about stories with editor Perry White (a dyspeptic Laurence Fishburne), you want to shout at him, "YOU COULD BE OUT SAVING LIVES RIGHT NOW!!!"
(Plus, the whole "now you see him without glasses, now you don't see him with glasses" thing is just aggravating as hell. Every movie asks you to suspend disbelief, but that's demanding we levitate it into the stratosphere.)
What a colossal disappointment. What a squandering of time and talent. What a way to launch a multiverse with a total faceplant.
Except Batman. Be yourself, but if you can be Batman, always be Batman. Especially if you're as good at it as Affleck.
Prepare to be shocked: I actually read all of the “Hunger Games” novels by Suzanne Collins, most of them prior to their movie version coming out.
Prepare to be even more shocked -- shockeder? -- I actually enjoyed them.
So when I pile on these films, it’s not out of dismissive distaste for young adult fiction in general or this series in particular. It’s out of… well, not love exactly. But at least like, which is genuine if not overly exuberant.
The biggest problem with “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay -- Part 2” is the “Part 2.”
This series, like other science fiction and fantasy genres (Harry Potter, The Hobbit, Twilight) takes the artistically craven idea of splitting up the last book into two different movies. It’s a transparent -- and successful -- attempt to wrangle twice the ticket sales from the same amount of story. Having come along already for two, three or more movies, fans are unlikely to bail. So it’s “print your own money” time.
This is the sort of decision made by accountants rather than storytellers.
While decently engaging, there simply isn’t enough narrative in Collins’ “Mockingjay” to justify nearly five hours’ worth of movie. The result is an overlong bore with surprisingly few action scenes or emotional thrills.
As the story opens, heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is leading a small team of rebels into the heart of the Capitol District to overthrow the nefarious President Snow (Donald Sutherland), who kept the outlying districts in line by making their youngsters fight in gladiator-style games lapped up by the jaded television viewing masses.
The city has been laden with high-tech traps -- mutants, fireballs, snares, etc. -- so they’re essentially traversing through another iteration of the Hunger Games.
Complicating things is the presence of Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), a fellow contestant from Katniss’ home district who was kidnapped and brainwashed by Snow. They faked a romance, and even a pregnancy, to earn the adulation of fans and become the first-ever couple to jointly win the Games. But now Peeta lives in a state of induced paranoia, and thinks Katniss is the cause of all his pain.
It’s hard to lead an assassination effort when a member of the team is trying to kill you, too.
Fold in the shifting schemes of the insurgent leader (Julianne Moore) and the mysterious machinations of the chief Gamemaker (the late and sorely missed Philip Seymour Hoffman), and you’ve got a confusing mishmash of loyalties and threats.
While “Mockingjay” the book built up to a serviceable crescendo in both plot and character development, the second half of the movie adaptation is surprisingly dull. Not enough action happens to keep us engaged, and the talkie scenes in between feel like labored filler.
Big budget, multi-part film franchises should continually raise the stakes and suck us ever further into the story. “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay -- Part 2” limps to a drawn-out ending.
Whatever you want to say about the quality of these films, they’ve consistently been released on video with top-drawer bonus features. This time is no exception.
There is a full commentary track with director Francis Lawrence and producer Nina Jacobson; an eight-part, feature-length documentary touching on virtually every aspect of the production, from special effects to casting; a photographic look at the behind-the-scenes journey; costume sketches; an exhibition from past fictional Panem Games, and more.
You can also buy “The Hunger Games Complete 4-Film Collection,” which includes 14 hours of bonus content from all the movies, including 139 featurettes and dozens of deleted scenes, many of them never seen before.
"Twilight" did it. "Hobbit" did it. So did "The Hunger Games." Ditto "Harry Potter." So are you really surprised the "Divergent" series took the jaded path of splitting up the final book in the young adult series into two movies?
It's easy math: 1 novel ÷ 2 films = twice as many tickets.
I'll say this about the science fiction/fantasy franchise: at least they don't try to stretch it out too far. While "The Divergent Series: Allegiant" is the weakest of the three films, it's a fairly tight two hours without a lot of fat in it. There's enough story here to carry things along -- unlike some of those other series mentioned above.
It's still a rather goofy affair, with Chosen One savior Tris Trio (Shailene Woodley) finally breaking out of the prison of post-apocalyptic Chicago to embrace the brave new world beyond. What she finds is merely a continuation of the Darwinian experiment she left behind, with various power-hungry blocs trying to wipe each other out.
When last we left them, the five factions had overthrown the dictator-like leader played by Kate Winslet. It's a world divided into different groups by abilities and disposition. A few, like Tris, are "divergent," meaning they contain more than one faction's qualities.
Rather than being mutants needing a little genocide, it turns out they're actually the successful conclusion of a centuries-long scientific trial by a group calling itself the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. Led by smiling Director David (Jeff Bridges), they're rescuing kids living on the fringes of the wasteland. While most humans on war-torn Earth are genetically "damaged," David thinks he can fix them by studying the makeup of the pure Tris.
Mentor/snugglebunny Four (Theo James) is suspicious of the whole setup, and glowers handsomely at David monopolizing Tris' time. Meanwhile, Peter (Miles Teller), the devious dude who keeps betraying Tris & Co. only to be let back into the fold time and again, is brought along to do this thing. Teller, playing to the material, smirks and skulks admirably.
Also tagging along is Caleb, Tris' brother played by Ansel Elgort, who was her boyfriend in "The Fault in Our Stars," and ain't that creepy. A studious sort who briefly sided with the bad guys, he's given a job by the Bureau using their advanced technology so he can snoop on anybody, anywhere, doing anything. (Which is a strange gig to give to the new guy in town.)
Hovering around the edges are Naomi Watts as Evelyn, Four's (very) distant mother and leader of the new order back in Chicago. She's about to face off with Johanna (Octavia Spencer), who's spent decades leading the pacifist faction but is ready to pull out the big guns at the drop of a hat.
There are some cool new gizmos to play around with -- memory tablets so you can live another person's experiences, flying drone discs so warriors can see all around them, a gooey orange serum when you want to make somebody forget everything.
Director Robert Schwentke, who also helmed the last film, stages his action scenes crisply and is careful to keep the talkie scenes only as long as absolutely necessary. A foursome of screenwriters were brought in to adapt the book by Veronica Roth ... well, half the book, anyway.
The problem with "The Divergent Series: Allegiant" is that, unlike the first two movies, the stakes never seem that high. The story has become a repetitive switchback in which each new group presents itself as the saviors, only to make the same mistakes everyone else did. Sort of like certain YA book adaptations.
