The Divergent Series: Allegiant – Review

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Allegiant comes to our screen with all the enthusiasm of Leo Varadkar pretending to like working class people. The film gives the impression of being even more thoroughly tired of the dystopian, YA fiction-adaptation genre than everyone else must be. I was going to say that if you love the Hunger Games series, then you might enjoy Allegiant. But that would actually depend on how you feel about shameless, dead-on-the-inside, dollar-inspired rip-offs. The female protagonist, Tris (Shailene Woodley), looks a bit like Jennifer Lawrence; her male love interest/sidekick is an unsettling face-mash of the two main guys in The Hunger Games; the story is a spin on the “dictatorship arises out of the ashes of America” line; and there is the same gimmick of everyone being divided into groups who have special tasks. Divergent? More like derivative.

The film is lacklustre on every level. The performances, like old wooden stairs, creak under the weight of dialogue written by a cliché-obsessed text-extraction programme. The CGI looks like it was ripped from a late-noughties video game. The entire project feels like it was assembled out of hollowed-out tropes; and yes, the production company have split the final book in the series into two films. It is possible that the Divergent series is a cannily prescient warning of what is to come: big walls built in the US by megalomaniacs, a proliferation of sleeveless waistcoats, endless war. Hopefully what it really does portend is an end to this tedious genre.

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