Reel Entropy

Set in Chicago, supposedly post-apocalypse but really not that different, society in Divergent is extremely caste-based. The five castes are divided by key personality characteristics, and each group has a role in running the city — the brave ones are the military police, the selfless ones govern, and so on. At age 16, children are given a fucked up Myers Briggs test to determine which caste they should go into, then told to completely disregard the results and “Choose who they really are” with absolutely no do-overs or take-backs. If the children have more than one personality trait — because really, who needs depth of character? — they are deemed “divergent.”

“Divergents” are a threat to “the system.” Don’t ask why.

The film follows Beatrice “Tris” Prior (Shailene Woodley) through this process and into the Dauntless, the military police caste. Prior’s test indicated she had three, count em three! strong personality traits, which is apparently a bad thing. Prior goes through naturalization into Dauntless society, watched over by Four (Theo James), who just won’t stop singing “Somehow I’ll Make a Man Out of You.” While a real movie would make this into a montage, Divergent takes this as its main body and shoehorns a big-kid plot in at the end.

There’s also a bit of the standard romance between Four (Theo James) and Tris (Shailene Woodley). Despite being the film’s most tired storyline, this romance contains the most departures from standard young adult procedure. Photos courtesy Summit Entertainment and Lionsgate.

Divergent is proof positive that a bad first act can render the rest of a movie worthless. The first 30-to-45 minutes of this movie are biblically awful.  Narration is used extensively, not as a storytelling device but as a replacement for acting, dialogue and other key subjects of theatre 101. It is confusing jumble of images and simple sentences that might begin to make sense if the viewer read the book. Even if the viewer hasn’t read it, it’s easy to tell how much information is being glossed over and when.

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Remember this, Hollywood? A man who can pull this look off with a straight face doesn’t need to prove himself a movie star. Photo courtesy AMC

Need for Speed’s function is to help Aaron Paul transition from Breaking Bad to movie stardom, and like most vehicle movies it’s destined to be thrown on a pile of the star’s better work or grouped with other poor showings in a quadruple-feature package of outdated home movie technology. That’s all it was designed to be, and that’s all it is.

This one is particularly sad to see. Paul always had the movie-star good looks and already demonstrated sufficient range in the series where he made his name. He doesn’t need vehicles to pump his tires. He’s a talented, popular, recognizable actor. Put him in a regular movie that seems to have genuine effort put into it and the audience will come.

The reason Need for Speed is so sad is this movie makes that less likely to happen. Paul initially tried out for the villain role, a spot where he actually could have showcased talent and was better suited for than the man who eventually got the part (Dominic Cooper, a fine actor in his own right). But the producers put him in the lead role to better sell the movie on the strength of his popularity, and after a poor marketing campaign, the movie opened in third place after the week-old Mr. Peabody & Sherman and 300: Rise of an Empire.

According to boxofficemojo.com projections, Need for Speed will end up about $16 million in the red. Producers will blame Paul and it will become much harder for him to find work, despite none of this being his fault or anything he even remotely controls.

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It took eight years for Frank Miller’s 300 to go from page to screen, but his unpublished (read: unwritten) follow-up has skipped the graphic novel treatment and gone straight to cinema.

Artemisia (Eva Green) evokes Batman & Robin with her be-nippled breastplate in 300: Rise of an Empire. Despite the fashion feaux pas and a questionable script, Green delivers a sterling performance. Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

300: Rise of an Empire — what empire? There is no empire doing any rising in this movie — sets up a rivalry between Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) and Artemisia (Eva Green). Themistocles fights in the Battle of Marathon and kills King Darius I (Yigal Naor), father of Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) from the first movie. After Marathon, the Persians are driven out of Greece for 10 years. Artemisia commands the Persian navy against Themistocles when they return in the battles of Artemisium and Salamis.

In terms of time, Rise of an Empire is a weird parallelquel to 300 — its three battles take place 10 years before, concurrently with and after the Battle of Thermopylae, depicted in the first movie. In terms of actual cinematic merit, it isn’t really related to 300 at all.

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Can U.S. Air Marshals be foreign? There’s no way Liam Neeson could pass for American. This movie already doesn’t pass the smell test.

Neeson stars as down-on-his-luck air marshal Bill Marks in Non-Stop. After the plane takes off, Marks is texted a threat to kill one person every 20 minutes via his super-secret members-only phone network unless $150 million is wired to an account that turns out to be in his name. Tension, action, racism and negotiations with terrorists ensue.

Non-Stop, more than its own movie, is a wonderful metaphor for Neeson’s career. He started as an award-winning dramatic actor, but he’s devolved into an action star with swiftly-fading credibility and a gorgeous Irish accent.

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