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The Divergent series: Allegiant

THE DIVERGENT SERIES: ALLEGIANT (Robert Schwentke). 120 minutes. Opens Friday (March 18). Rating: NN


Allegiant is the third movie in the increasingly pointless Divergent series, the big-budget YA franchise that apparently only exists to keep America’s digital-effects shops in business.

Yeah, I know: anything that makes Shailene Woodley an international box-office draw is a net positive. But the films themselves are so bland and monotonous that it’s difficult to invest beyond being happy that actors I like are being well-compensated for their work.

After the defeat of Kate Winslet’s evil Janine and the collapse of the dopey faction system at the end of last year’s Insurgent, this third film – supposedly the first half of an epic adaptation of Veronica Roth’s final novel – simply repeats the story of the previous movies in a new setting, taking Woodley’s unlikely hero Tris and her friends to a high-tech base at O’Hare Airport, where the scientists have been monitoring the social experiment of Chicago for 200 years.

But this new setting is not as benevolent as it seems, which means we get another two hours of Tris and Theo James’s Four trying to figure out where they stand – and what they stand for – in a world that insists on defining them.

The factions having been dispensed with, now it’s all about who’s “pure” and who’s “damaged”, overseen by a fatherly scientist (Jeff Daniels) who’s convinced that Tris – the one genetically pure human to emerge from the Chicago experiment – is the key to humanity’s future.

Really, though, that’s just an excuse for the series to sell us the same garbage all over again, with tedious virtual-reality sequences killing time before a climactic race to stop a catastrophe. Woodley’s always watchable, and Miles Teller continues to have fun as the dickish wild-card Peter, but they can’t zap this junk pile to life for more than a few seconds at a time.

How they’re going to get a fourth picture out of this is beyond me. But think of all the new kitchens it’ll pay for.

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