FAILURES The Darkest Minds ANDY’S RATING:
Rails into a world of clichés and confusion
dangerous they are swiftly executed after their superpower detecting scan.
Ruby (Hunger Games actress Amandla Stenberg) is an orange but exploits a glaring flaw in the test by using her superpower to make her examiner think she is a green.
One day, a mysterious woman (Mandy Moore) busts her out of the camp. She tells Ruby that she’s one of only two surviving oranges and could have an important role to play in a very sketchily defined resistance movement.
But Ruby, perhaps understandably, doesn’t trust grown-ups. After getting a bad vibe from the woman’s partner, she runs off and joins a gang of escapees led by a hunky, brooding blue, Liam (Harris Dickinson).
After a stodgy first act, where someone uses a colour-coded chart to explain the setup, the action moves at a fair clip.
Unfortunately, in between chase scenes and smouldering glances, director Jennifer Yuh Nelson gives us a little time to mull over the plot.
Would parents really allow the state to round up their kids? How is the human race going to survive without children? What is so scary about maths? And if our heroes need to travel incognito, why are they casually driving on main roads in a very spottable van like the Scooby Doo team?
Ruby may not be a genius green, but at times she seems supernaturally thick.
In one scene, she uses her Jedi powers of suggestion to get a kid to cough to the location of a secret safe haven.
But instead of asking for the postcode, she asks him for a clue. This tees up the next scene, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
When they meet, an instantly besotted Liam tells her she will be arrested and executed if she goes back to her family home.
A few minutes later, he’s dropping her off outside her drive.
Nobody spots her and the fascist police, who are supposedly desperate to find her, haven’t bothered to organise a stakeout.
Perhaps this makes sense in the book or maybe all will become clear in the sequel that is rather optimistically teed up at the end.
Stenberg is likeable enough to lead a trilogy, but they will need to find some smarter writers and a much more capable director.