I guess you could call this another version of “March Madness”. For the third year in a row, the third month of the year treats us to another installment in “The Divergent Series”. The popularity of this big screen adaptation of the teen action novel series has been dropping with each new chapter. This third edition, “Allegiant”, is the worst one yet.
Shailene Woodley’s Tris and boyfriend Four (Theo James) are STILL trying to make it out of Dystopian Chicago. About 20 minutes into “Allegiant”, they and a few members of their gang are finally able to scale the wall and see what life’s like out in the “real world”.
Tris and the others are quickly welcomed into the high-tech metropolis of the Purists, where Bureau head David (played by Jeff Daniels) recruits Tris, who’s the only “pure” member of the group – the rest are all “damaged” – to help him with a plan to make the entire country great again. That campaign slogan actually works as Tris falls for David’s propaganda, though Four is suspicious… And for good reason – as the “good guys” quickly learn that, even in the distant future – the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
There’s a point when a memory eliminating gas is introduced to the story. I kept hoping that management would start pumping it into the theater so I could forget my two hours watching “Allegiant”. There’s hardly anything interesting here: The script is below the basic standards for this genre and the dialogue is bland. The best line actually comes from a random bad guy. He and his fellow soldiers are ready to kill our protagonists, but instead he drops his gun and says, “Screw This! I’m Outta Here!” I wish I could’ve said the same thing – but instead I gave “Allegiant” a fighting chance to redeem itself with a suspenseful climax and exciting cliffhanger – since this is Part 1 of a two-part series finale. But director Robert Schwentke couldn’t even get that right.
Naomi Watts and Octavia Spencer are back, but it’s Daniels who gets most of the screen time and NEVER STOPS TALKING! He wears the same suit throughout the entire movie, which hopefully means he got to do all his scenes in one day.
A couple of the action scenes do work. But if you weren’t invested in this franchise from the beginning, there’s no reason to start now. And if you saw the first two “Divergents” and hope No. 3 is a winner, you can safely wait next year’s finale and won’t really have missed anything.
On The Official LCJ Report Card, “The Divergent Series: Allegiant” gets a D.
Running Time: 120 min.