Allegiant

I’ve been onboard with the dystopian adventures of Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) in her postapocalyptic future Chicago, but this third outing – with the fourth and final installment due next year – is a disappointing downfall from the first two films, which only just skated by on the novelty of a cool female action hero and the appealing metaphor for the struggle against enforced conformity her world offered. Here, in Allegiant, based on the first half of the novel of the same name, the reasons for the precarious foundations of her world are revealed, the metaphor fails and the concrete reality that replaces it is far less intriguing.

Classified as dangerously Divergent in a society where almost everyone is easily slotted into five factions based upon their temperament and skills, Tris – in the first two films, Divergent and Insurgent – led fight in Chicago to regain control from a ruthless leader who was cracking down on Divergents and the rogue Factionless. That culminated, at the end of Insurgent, with the revelation that Chicago was the site of a grand experiment, that the rise of Divergents meant the experiment had been a success, and that the people of Chicago were welcome to rejoin the rest of humanity. And this is the big decision to be made as Allegiant opens: Shall they go out to meet the people who have been experimenting on them? How can such people ever be trusted? But Factionless leader Evelyn (Naomi Watts), effectively in control of the city and inciting mob hatred against the defeated Erudite Faction, has pushed Chicago to the brink of civil war, and perhaps those unknown outsiders can help restore peace. So off go Tris, her boyfriend and lieutenant Four (Theo James), and a handful of others, over the wall and through an inhospitable hellscape to see what is out there.

The small pleasures of getting answers to the mysteries of Tris’s world are overwhelmed by the practical considerations of what those answers bring. Those aren’t, alas, further questions and more intriguing mysteries, just accidental conundrums of plot and character that smarter scripting and a more cohesively considered science-fiction culture-scape could have avoided.

There is one huge plothole that brings the entire story crumbling, one that will echo through the whole rest of the film: Why didn’t those experimenters just do X? Without spoiling, it concerns a matter of how order and control are handled in the city Tris and her friends discover beyond the wall, and it’s something that she and they should have found themselves subjected to as well. There would barely be a story if they had and if there is good reason why they are spared this treatment, it is never offered. We see it, though, and the stakes for the experimenters – led by David (Jeff Daniels) – are so high that it is wildly implausible that it was not part of their plan all along.

Between that plothole and the loss of the metaphor about conformity that has informed Tris’s journey, all we’re left with is a weak and barely acknowledged philosophical clash between Tris’s young and eager idealism and the messy, complicated reality she discovers beyond the wall, as embodied by the pragmatic David. But even that gives way to the dullest sort of good-versus-evil battle that throws away the complex sci-fi concepts it had been playing with and reverts to a simplistic exercise in action filmmaking, complete with a ticking-clock countdown that must be stopped. The ending is so anticlimactic, yet there’s still another whole movie to be gotten through. I had been looking forward to seeing where Tris’s story would go, and now I feel as if I can confidently guess it all already.

THE DIVERGENT SERIES: ALLEGIANT (2) Directed by Robert Schwentke • Starring Shailene Woodley, Zoe Kravitz, Naomi Watts, Jeff Daniels • Rated PG-13 • 121 min. • At Maya Cinemas, Century Cinemas Del Monte, Northridge Cinemas, Century Marina, Cannery Row XD, Lighthouse Cinemas.