Rating (2 out of 5)

There is true talent here to make a move that last only 1 hour and 45 minutes a snooze fest, job well done.  Actually I snickered at parts, which kept me awake.  I don’t think I made it to the 1/2 way point before I started getting antsy in my seat.  Two young girls in the row behind me were talking and giggling, and I think the movie was targeted at them.

Heres the story, one day, something happens, and from that day forward, kids either get powers or die.  Our heroine, gets hers, wipes her parents memories of her (by mistake), and is taken of the kids with superpowers internment camps.  Powers are classified in a pyramid with colors, green being safe all the way to red being most dangerous.  Our heroine is orange, and that is a terminate on site power.  The Orange power is to take control over people’s minds.  I think this is more dangerous than red’s which just produce fire and heat.  Learn from X-Men, if you can manipulate minds, you can manipulate the reds, which makes you stronger.  Professor X is the bomb.

She convinces the doctor that she is green.  She is in the camp for six years, and escapes with the help of the “League”.  There are no more kids, period.  No more have been born.  No mind you, kids that were 18, are now 24.  I am sure the lack of babies and breeding is addressed somewhere in the book, but I don’t recall it being touched on in the movie.

At a gas station they stop and meet with another League member, and she reads the mind of the other member and sees bad things.  So she runs away and meets up with 3 kids going it on their own.

They are able to escape a tracer (bounty hunter) and League.  The runaways are a young Asian girl who doesn’t talk, a black kid, and our handsome white love interest.  Our heroine is black, since I am mentioning everyone’s race.  They travel a bit, and determine the best way to go is to find a camp run my a kid called Slip.  They discover the clues and make their way to the camp.  On their way there is a boring stop to her parents house, and a run in with a tracer.

When they get to the camp, they discover that the presidents son, who the government claims was cured, is running the camp.  As you soon as you see him you know how this is going to go.  He is an Orange, like our heroine.  He teaches her but also learns from her how to erase peoples memories.  We find out soon that he has taken over his father (the president), the government and is building an army of powerful kids.

The government comes to the camp to round up the kids.  My problem with the camp scene, is we have youths with powers, but they only people who seem to use them is our little team.  The action sequence was actually one of the better parts of the movie.

Our team is able to escape the camp and the capture by the evil government, but have to go their separate ways.  Our heroine eventual erases memories of her from her boyfriends brain and sends him on his way while she joins the league.  This scene by itself emblematic of the problems of this movie, the sequence is about 5 minutes too long.  We know what she has to do, but it lasted too long.  Maybe it is exactly how it was in the book, but on screen it didn’t work.

It ends with her in a stadium becoming a leader of the league.  That is the image you see often, of her with her hand in the air with orange on it.

I am sure the book explains more, or it does in the subsequent books, but we really didn’t get a lot of answers to items in the movie.  Instead we stopped to have multiple moments of looking into each others eyes.  OMG that was over 1/2 the movie.  Trust your audience, we know after the red dress that they were going to be in love.  We didn’t need that many scenes or times to prove it.

We had a whole walking across the landscape montage that also went way long.  At times I thought to myself, “They made an hour movie, but need to stretch out so they added these scenes”.  There was a Michael Bay moment; they are walking in the golden field, and in the background torn up US flag waving in the wind.  I chuckled out loud.

I know there are other books in the series, but I hope they don’t make more of this one.  This was awful.  This should have been a CW show or Freeform.  The pace would have worked better over 10 – 45 minute episodes.

The highlight of the movie was Chubs, our black character.  He was funny and added humor at points where the lovey-dovey had just gone on too long.l.  That is it, there was way too much romance and not a enough humor and action.