Movie Review: Divergent (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

You want Divergent to be a better movie than it is, if only for its up-and-coming young star, Shailene Woodley. With its Twilight franchise gone and nearly forgotten, Summit Pictures has been grooming a couple of Young Adult novel adaptations as potential money-making successors. The first, Ender's Game, was a complex, male-oriented sci-fi war picture burdened by the troublesome politics of both it and its author. The second, Divergent, has the luxury of showcasing a new female star even more appealing than Jennifer Lawrence, the lead of its most successful rival, The Hunger Games. It's also helmed by possibly the most talented director a YA movie series has attracted yet, Neal Burger (The Illusionist). Even with all of these winning components in place, Divergent still feels half-baked.

More Like Olympus is Flailing

by Tony Dayoub

One doesn't go into Olympus Has Fallen expecting originality or nuance. As trailers have made pretty clear, this is a noisy, over-the-top potboiler that basically boils down to this description: Die Hard in the White House. However, Antoine Fuqua—whose last solid film was Training Day and displayed the most ambition in 2004's flawed, but not-hard-to-like, King Arthur—seems here to be working out some resentment over not getting a chance to do the long-planned 24 theatrical upgrade he was briefly up for. Or at least it feels that way because Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is as generic a clone of Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer as one has seen in a long time. And as goes our hero, so goes Olympus Has Fallen, a scattered mess of a picture as far as even movies of this kind go.