2wenty 2wenty: Insurrection (2020)

It’s uncommon – but not unheard of – for a studio to change the name of a movie at the last minute, or even after release.
“In Time” (2011) was titled “Im.mortal” for a chunk of its ad campaign, and “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014) has been overshadowed by its own subtitle and marketing play “Live. Die. Repeat.”

Thus it’s not really a surprise that “2wenty 2wenty” (2020) had a last minute name change; I think it’s a drastic improvement, since the original was “2wenty 2wenty: Fires, Hornets, Disease, Racism, Derechos, Septuagenarians, and Space.”
“Star Trek: Insurrection” (1998) was pretty terrible, and considering how awful “2wenty 2wenty” ended, I can’t help but think that the writers were doing some kind of weird call-back.
Makes sense, I guess, since three different Star Trek things were shown during the run time, so it’s a very specific reference, but I’ll accept it.

That said: this iteration was supposed to conclude when the ball dropped into the rolling credits – like all others did – but because the writers just couldn’t figure out their own pacing, they had to cram a last-minute event that happened during the end credits sequence.
Imagine if they’d titled “Iron Man 2” (2010) as “Iron Man 2: Rise of Thor” simply because they found Mjolnir in the end credits? How stupid would that have been?!
“2wenty 2wenty: Insurrection” is a much better name, but it’s definitely cheating.

Anyway.

“2wenty 2wenty” was the direct sequel to last year’s “2wenty 9teen” (2019) with all the quality control of a direct-to-DVD release.

Going into this, everyone knew that “2wenty 2wenty One!” was already in production, so I wasn’t expecting a cliffhanger or anything world-changing at the end of “2wenty 2wenty,” and I think the writers knew that.
Even worse: every one of these is split into four acts with three major scenes per act. Somehow, against all reason, the writers and director managed to make this feel like there were 67 scenes.
Obviously it was still the same length, but sweet mercy did it feel unnecessarily long…

So.
Instead of bothering to tell a cohesive story with any characters you wanted to get behind and root for, it seems like the writers chose to make everything a Deus Ex Machina – no matter where the plot was headed, something entirely unexpected came out of left field. Beyond that, major characters didn’t go through any development (what little of that there was we saw over the last three iterations), which meant that the script was driven entirely by plot events instead of anything dynamic.

“2wenty 9teen” ended with a post-credits scene of someone coughing in China, which felt like a shot-for-shot clone of the end-credits scene in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011). The director was nice enough to get us through the first quarter of this story before that previous end-credits scene resulted in anything of value here, but when it did… wow. They took it far.
Pandemics are a tough choice for a major plot device. So tough that in the movies that use them – like “The Stand” (1994) or “Contagion” (2011) – the disease is the only plot point, because a pandemic is a pretty massive deal, so there’s never any additional screen time available for other natural disasters or major character differences.
But here, they dropped in the main plot of the disease at the 1/4 mark, and then almost immediately followed it up with riots and political unrest at the 1/3 point.

Why?
Why wasn’t the pandemic enough?
Who decided that a corrupt police force needed to be included?
We got a very clear understanding for why the protesters were out protesting, especially if you’ve seen the previous 244 installments, but the villainous police force was just shitty writing. The set designers wrote “to protect and serve” on damn near every cop car you saw, so making them bad was technically a twist, but it was so obviously telegraphed by side scenes and background events we’d all watched previously that it almost circled around to lampshading.
If any of the high-powered characters bothered to pay attention to what those cops were doing, there wouldn’t have been a problem; but instead the issue was allowed to fester until it boiled over. Truly though, what made the situation worse was an apparent willful misunderstanding by one of the largest cop organizations: the NYPD. They couldn’t seem to grasp why public opinion was against them, but at least script karma is coming for them.
Ugh. What two-dimensional character development.

I also need to mention that there was a bunch of stuff that just got dropped in and then completely forgotten about.
Like the murder hornets.
They showed up and were explained to be a major issue for a little while, and then… nothing. No one mentioned them ever again and they apparently phased out of existence. They were hyped up to be this seriously dangerous wild creature that just stopped. A few times some side character would mention stuff about them, but that’s all we got from it.
We also got hurricanes which, again, were apparently really important for a brief moment and then the writers just forgot about those too.
There was even a bit in there about selecting a new judge, which got a lot of heat because she was Catholic, which was a weird point of contention as 5 of the 9 judges were already Catholic and the crowd chanting ‘Catholic Bad!’ was the same crowd that had constantly railed about freedom of religion earlier. Weird.
It seems pretty clear to me that the writing staff kept getting fired and new staff was brought in to “punch it up” before getting fired too.
And on top of that: there was some weird in-universe media app that got a lot of attention. There was a lot of script time devoted to demonizing it, and while a lot of characters liked to say things like “private businesses can choose not to service someone,” they got really upset when a private business decided to stop dealing with some of the characters.

The character of “The President” is always shown to be some kind of different. In “Independence Day” (1999) he was a jet-fighter badass; in “Olympus Has Fallen” (2013) he was Morgan Freeman. In this one, like the last three, El Presidente (Donald Trump) was a businessman with records to show that he was very, very bad at it. In previous iterations, he talked about ‘draining the swamp’ and ‘locking her up’ and whatnot, but this time around he took a hard right turn into full-blown gibberish and started blaming the events at hand on imaginary organizations like “The Deep State” and boogeymen like “QAnon,” which was approximately shown to be a creation of a few particularly stupid internet trolls.
As I’ve talked about before, I’m okay with the idea of fantastical content if the story is set up in such a way as to support it, but as nothing in the 245 parts (including this one) included any serious or conclusive evidence of mystical anythings, then it was just more bad dialogue choice that the writers put in because they thought we needed yet another thing to keep track of.
Even worse: they kept building on this plot device too, which resulted in a baseless conspiracy theory about fake votes that ultimately led to the end-credits sequence.

As I mentioned above, pandemics are a major storyline to follow, and thus usually focus on one or two particularly heroic leaders who take charge and figuratively punch the virus into submission. El Presidente’s move to not do anything to stop the virus ended up killing 300,000+ Americans (400,000+ as I write this while starting the sequel). While some villains have an elaborate Rube-Goldberg-style evil plan that only works because they’re in a movie (looking at you, Mr. Silva from “Skyfall” (2012)), I certainly don’t think that was part of El Presidente’s plan, since they ended up writing his character out anyway.
I’m still not actually sure El Presidente had a plan was to begin with. He had four entire screenplays in which to execute his dastardly deeds, yet still got nothing done.
Like most villains, he did a few things that the audience could watch at and recognize as a positive – like his sorta-directed tactics in the China B-plot – but by and large, he just flailed the entire time, like he was expecting the script writers to simply write him out of every hole he dug for himself.

I’ll be honest. I absolutely did not see the finale coming.
Sure, I watched El Presidente rile up his death cult over his four iterations, but I didn’t expect it to go the way it did. It was wild watching a bunch of domestic terrorists who called themselves “patriots” storm a federal building and endanger the lives of politicians for the sake of overturning a legally sound election simply because El Presidente didn’t want to get written out of the series.
That said, I think the cast and crew have decided they’re tired of him, so now I’m seriously doubting whether they’ll even consider letting him return in four years.
Frankly, I’m tired of his character and I’d like someone new; I’ve got my fingers crossed that we won’t have to see him again in “2wenty 2twenty 4our” will be a relief.

I’d like to say “what’s weird to me…” for my next segue, but that would feel massively repetitive, since the entirety of “2wenty 2wenty” was weird.
But I’ll do it any way:
What’s especially weird to me is the rules that the writers established and how blatantly El Presidente tried to break them, only to get shot down.
Seriously: “Seventeen Seventy Six: Let Freedom Ring” (1776) made it pretty clear what the established rules would be, and the Founding Fathers cast seemed pretty explicit on what they expected out of everyone in the various roles. In fact, you can see that list of rules if you pause the DVD and navigate to the ‘extras’ menu.
So the very idea that the writers let El Presidente and his motley mob of sycophants keep trying to break them just adds to my opinion that they didn’t know what they were doing and kept cramming items and events in simply to keep audience attention.
And to make it even more bizarre: those rules are available for anyone to look at, at any time, and they’re not particularly complicated, so I’m not sure why so many extras were okay with attempting to break them, especially since it looks like they’re going to get in a lot of trouble with the production company.
There are dedicated apps you can get for your phone just for this in-universe rule set!

I’ve got a lot of questions for the writing staff for why they wrote the cops to be so violently aggressive during the BLM protest sequences in the first half, then almost entirely uninvolved with the terrorist insurrection at the end. It’s absolutely terrible world-building; when I reviewed “Ad Astra” I chalked a similar behavior up to characters simply being reduced to puppets, but here I think the writers somehow forgot that the police existed as an in-universe asset, so they forgot to give them any direction.
That, or they really wanted to take the ‘corrupt police’ trope a step too far, but I’m trying to be hopeful.

Credit where credit is due: the special effects for this were phenomenal. Every single thing looked realistic, like you could practically reach out and touch it.
I don’t know who coughed up the budget for the renderings on this one, but they did a bang-up job!

Soundtrack for this was actually pretty great.
Taylor Swift released a surprise album, a lot of parody tunes were written, and the soundtrack for the in-universe “Wonder Woman 1984” franchise was top-notch.

But music can’t save this dumpster fire.
I’m giving this a 1 Claw.
I’ve given things -1 Claws before because I’m angry at how much of my time I’ve lost watching it, but I just want to leave “2wenty 2wenty: Insurrection” behind and never look at it again; witnessing it was nothing short of exhausting.
I definitely do no recommend it. Read about it if you want, but don’t repeat it.

It should come as no surprise that I write most of my reviews as I’m consuming the story, so I don’t forget details. Unfortunately, I didn’t start writing this review until about the 3/4 point, and sweet mercy so many things happened!
I know I left a lot out, and I’m sorry for those of you who wanted a more complete recap, but I simply don’t have the memory for it – the writers crammed too many things in and I lost track.
El Presidente may be the single most stupid villain I’ve ever seen; if it weren’t for the gullible masses that consumed the media that simply echoed his points, he wouldn’t have been able to get anything done.
I’d rather watch movies about old James Bond villains than this loser ever again.