Film review: Divergent series: Allegiant will have fans sorely tested by plodding action

The film, directed by Robert Schwentke, has a repetitive plot and characters that lack depth

Caleb (Ansel Elgort) and Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) in Allegiant. Murray Close / Lionsgate via AP Photo

The Divergent series: Allegiant

Director: Robert Schwentke

Starring: Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Jeff Daniels, Miles Teller, Zoë Kravitz

Two stars

The Divergent series has always felt a bit like a second-rate Hunger Games, but the third film in the series truly exposes it.

Allegiant, based on the first half of Veronica Roth's final book in her hit trilogy, is a messy, meandering action-adventure that plods along with about as muc.h urgency as a two-legged tortoise.

Perhaps it is banking on the fact that however poor the set-up, devoted fans will return, regardless, next year for the grand finale, Ascendant. Not on this form, they won't.

Directed by Robert Schwentke, who also made the second film Insurgent, part three begins brightly enough, as heroine Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) and her muscular paramour Four (Theo James) make their escape from the ruins of Chicago.

Cast your minds back to the last episode Insurgent, and you will recall that Prior discovered that the society in which she lives, which is divided into four factions, is all part of a social experiment – one she wants no further part of. Along with her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort), duplicitous Peter (Miles Teller) and spunky Christina (Zoë Kravitz), she and Four head over the city's electrified wall. This is a heart-pounding sequence, one that recalls the visceral thrills of the zip-wire scene in the first film. But it proves to be a false dawn.

Once over the wall, our heroes are dumped in a barren landscape as featureless as the rest of the film.

Arriving in a toxic wasteland called the Fringe, they are met by representatives of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare, whose hi-tech antiseptic world is hidden behind an invisible wall.

Their leader is the ultra-smooth David (Jeff Daniels), who tries to recruit Prior (“You saved a city, help me save the world”) and puts the others to work, spying on the infighting in Chicago.

Can he be trusted? It doesn’t take a postgraduate in international relations to work out the answer to that one.

Schwentke’s aesthetic palette here might be all reds, yellows and oranges (lending the film a sort of vintage, Barbarella look at times) but Roth’s characters are pure black and white. That wouldn’t matter so much if the plot was not so repetitive: Teller’s Peter betrays them again – oh, will they ever learn? With Woodley and James both utterly hogtied by the lack of any sort of depth of dimensions to their characters, it all makes for a rather tedious experience.

Things liven up a little when Daniels appears – but even his character lacks the charisma that Kate Winslet injected into her role in Divergent.

All of this does not bode well for the final chapter next year – only the most blinkered of adolescent fans need apply.

• Allegiant is in cinemas now