Movie Review: 'The Divergent Series: Allegiant'

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.

'Insurgent' Movie Review: A Murderous Fever Dream Mixed With Tepid Teen Melodrama

The Divergent Series: Insurgent, the latest chapter in The Hunger Games heir apparent, is a flaming-hot, crazy-ass train wreck. And I mean that in both the most entertaining and terrible ways possible. To be sure, this is a significant improvement over the previous film in the family, 2014’s Divergent. It’s not without serious flaws, and I don’t know if I’d go so far to call it good or actually recommend it, but while it can be tedious and asinine, random weirdness and strange flourishes mean it can also be pretty damn entertaining.

'Divergent' Movie Review

Weirdly enough, I am not the target audience for most young adult fiction. As it turns out, bitter late 30s Internet denizens are not the demographic that books like Veronica Roth’s Divergent, nor Neil Burger’s subsequent movie adaptation, are aimed at. That much is expected, as are the melodramatic romance and angst-filled teenage rebellion, and depending on your tolerance level for such things, they might not even be total deal breakers. If nothing else, Divergent is still light years more tolerable than any of the Twilight movies. 

'Divergent' Teaser Looks To Get In On The Lucrative Dystopian Teen Market

 

So the last few days have been heavy on hype for Summit Entertainment’s upcoming adaptation of Veronica Roth’s best-selling young adult novel Divergent. There was a brief synopsis laying out the core plot details, an infographic that shed a little more light on the five factions of the story, and, of course, 13 seconds worth of footage from the film. All of this was a build up towards the money shot, which happened yesterday at MTV’s Video Music Awards, when the studio debuted the first teaser trailer for the film. Everything else was really just a teaser for the teaser.