Despite my soft spot for YA adaptations, bad reviews and apathy kept me away from Divergent (2014) and its sequel. Still, with a new installment in theaters and constant HBO rotation, I gave them a try. I want my four hours back.Triss Prior (Shailene Woodley) lives in a future Chicago, where the world's decimated by war and divided into five "factions" based on ability. Triss is "Divergent," showing traits of several factions, and chooses to join Dauntless, the warrior caste. Triss bonds with trainer Four (Theo James) and learns that the wise Erudites are targeting Divergents for extinction. Triss's native caste, Abnegation (social workers), is considered equally suspect.
Based on Veronica Roth's novel, Divergent lazily mashes The Hunger Games with The Giver. Director Neil Burger treats viewers to familiar sights of dystopian cities, warrior teens and feuding factions without any cleverness or invention. It's a barrage of action and exposition, interspersed with bizarre dream sequences that somehow reveal Triss's faction. That's the only fresh flourish in a film bereft of originality. It's amazing that teenagers resisting genocidal future fascists feels stale, but here we are.
Shailene Woodley makes an unconvincing, cut-rate Katniss Everdeen. The charming, off-beat star of The Descendants and The Fault in Our Stars becomes an action girl without toughness, grit or personality. Supporting players are ciphers: Theo James' wooden love interest, Kate Winslet's icy villain, Miles Teller's sneering bully, Ashley Judd and Tony Goldwyn as Triss's harried parents. We don't care about anyone, least of all our heroine.
Bland as it is, Divergent hangs together in its derivative way, with action scenes moving the plot and enliven the clichés. Its sequel, The Divergent Series: Insurgent (2015) is hopeless. Triss sports a pixie cut and flits among different groups - a commune of "Factionless" outcasts, the brutally honest Candor faction - while fleeing the evil Erudites. The movie devolves to a repetitive series of gunpoint confrontations, escapes and chases, wearing thin long before an empty anticlimax.
Movies like Divergent are cinematic Slim Jims, marginally edible crud indiscriminately smashed into a consumer product. As for Allegiant, now playing in theaters? I'd rather watch God's Not Dead 2.
