Insurgent, the second installment of The Divergent Series, opened in theatres this week, but did the Hunger Games rival offer anything to one-up its predecessor?

Heroine Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) continues her fight against the dystopian society headed by Kate Winslet's Jeanine. As a Divergent, she does not fit into any of the social class molds that form the orderly society within their walled city and so she and other Divergents and Factionless attempt to join forces against their common foe.

Unfortunately, as warrior heroines go, on-screen Tris has little in her arsenal to rival other new teenage heroines such as Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games or Arya Stark from the Game of Thrones HBO series.

As Manohla Dargis of the New York Times described her: "Tris still isn't all that engaging, even if she remains an effective empathy generator despite her occasional need to shoot to kill. She feels bad about that, mind you, shedding tears now and then amid the mayhem and exegesis. In broad strokes, Tris is the classic odd girl out and compulsory self-reliant heroine who leads with her brains instead of her inevitable good looks, the protagonist who struggles to feel she belongs even though she was born to lead."

The rest of the movie didn't exactly do much better than the first installment in the series either. Although it had brief shining moments of better chemistry among the leads and action sequences that did not go over the top to make it go beyond its PG-13 rating, it still was decisively bland.

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it out: "There's less exposition, more action and a discernible spark in the acting that was missing before. But let's face it, the trilogy of young-adult novels that Veronica Roth cooked up to rival 'The Hunger Games' never loses the stale odor of also-ran," he said.

To its detriment, the entire Divergent Series will never be able to shake off the comparisons to the much more engaging Hunger Games series that inspired the former.

Some fans see a ray of light in Insurgent, however, saying that director Robert Schwentke found better storytelling chops to deliver the plot than Divergent.

Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson observed that Schwentke, as well as the screenwriters, were able to turn a formulaic, monotonous story into something marginally better than its source material: "I'm told [they] made significant changes from Roth's book, [and] have crafted something that's often compelling, startlingly violent, and yet graceful, too."

The final book in the trilogy will be split into two movies (just like the Hunger Games). However, many are wondering if the exhausted story needs one more movie to come to its conclusion.

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