At the Cinema - April 2014

Divergent – 8 

You’ll like this movie if you like

• Young starlets
• Futuristic stuff
• Hunger games type action

Shailene Woodley stars as divergent in Divergent.  What’s a divergent you ask?  Well, in the future, it’s a multi-talented individual who is too talented for her own good.  In the future you see, civilization is split into 4 distinct factions.  If you test out to be good at all the factions, you are considered divergent, and a threat to the governing faction. 

The movie is fairly entertaining, and Woodley is definitely a star in the making.  It’s not for everyone, in that it’s one of those movies that Hollywood churns out for teenage girls.  The action and story are fine, and although there’s a few too many dream sequences, Divergent is priming itself for a Hunger Games style run.  It might work.

Draft Day – 7

You’ll like this movie if you like

• Soap Operas
• The NFL Draft
• Kevin Costner

There’s a great movie to be made about the NFL Draft.  This isn’t it.  Maybe the NFL Network will do it and go into the research, the combine results, the trade negotiations, the agents, the contracts.  Here’s what it probably won’t include:  A Cleveland Browns GM having an affair with his assistant, finding out she’s pregnant the day of the draft, which happens to be the same day his mother wants to distribute his father’s ashes, who was the head coach he fired, so the GM goes in a closet not once, but twice to talk to his girlfriend, but he still gets interrupted, and the number one pick in the draft falls into his lap, and the team hasn’t even researched the consensus number one pick, and so they’re watching film at the last minute, and sorting out rumors, while the GM carries around a mysterious yellow piece of paper, and tries to deal with a head coach who isn’t on board, and an owner who gets so angry with him that he gets from draft headquarters in New York back to Cleveland in about 5 minutes.  And, if all of that isn’t artificial enough for you, director Ivan Reitman uses more split screens than 24 would ever use in an attempt to heighten the drama.  What it really hides is a script that’s light on football, and heavy on soap.  Too bad, because this movie, totally sanctioned by the NFL and with all the right cameos, could have been a football fan’s classic.  Instead, it’s just another kitchen sink movie.

But there is some redemption here.  Two things in fact.

So while the first hour and a half of the movie rivals Glee for artificial drama, the last half hour almost makes up for all this because even though there are a lot of preposterous events during the actual draft, at least it’s exciting to watch.  Last minute trades and trade talk, even though the end result is telegraphed 5 minutes into the movie, is exciting stuff and the movie ends with a bang, and it’s a crowd pleaser, making  us forget how silly the movie has been to this point.

While Kevin Costner and Jennifer Garner are reliable, they have little believability here. There is so little chemistry between them, you can see why his mother, played by the great Ellen Burstyn, is dubious.

But the standout actor in this movie is in a supporting role.  It is Chadwick Bosworth, who plays the about-to-be-drafted linebacker who thinks he’s the maniacal Ray Lewis – type once in a generation defensive player.  He plays his role to the hilt and is totally convincing.  Bosworth didn’t really convince me when he played Jackie Robinson in “42,” but he’s the whole package here.  The best scenes are his, and he tackles them ferociously.  He speeds away with the movie, but that isn’t a huge challenge.