There’s a definite hierarchy in the world of dystopian young
adult movie adaptations. The Hunger Games obviously ruled
the roost for four movies, and The Maze Runner films have
found a nice spot in the marketplace. But for every successful franchise there
are a handful of nonstarters—I Am Number Four, The
Mortal Instruments—that never find an audience, despite the
popularity of the source novels. The Divergent Series films
are a kind of middle ground. They’re not huge,
record-shattering affairs, but they’re popular enough that
they keep coming, and while they’ve never been particularly egregious, they’ve
been, at best, innocuous. The latest chapter, however, The Divergent
Series: Allegiant, takes a precipitous nosedive from bland and
forgettable to straight up terrible.
