The Divergent Series: Allegiant

SPOILER-FREE MOVIE REVIEW

Allegiant is the third movie in the Divergent series, after Divergent (2014) and Insurgent (2015).

This one follows the journey of Tris (Shailene Woodley) and co as they discover what's beyond the wall which keeps those in Chicago away from the rest of the world.

I'm not going to beat around the bush. I'll just get straight to it.

The Divergent Series: Allegiant was pretty darn terrible.

Now, before I go in-depth as to why it was terrible, I'll talk about the good points first... and there aren't many.

I quite liked the development of a certain few characters from the last adventure.

Characters like Tris, Four (Theo James) and Christina (Zoë Kravitz) appear more battle-hardened and mature, and it's a nice touch to show these changes on-screen.

I especially liked the development of Caleb (Ansel Elgort) and Peter (Miles Teller), who have a lot more to do in this movie than in the previous two.

The relationship between Tris and Four is also handled decently, with the pair showing good chemistry yet again as well as having a layered story this time around, complete with some welcomed drama.

However, I felt that the romance kind of free-loads off of the relationship developments from the previous movies instead of making serious steps to progressing it further, making it not as convincing as it could've been.

Apart from the characters, I liked the sheer scale of the sets in the movie. they were big, grand and looked legit enough, so kudos to the visual effects team there.

The music by Joseph Trapanese (yes, that's his name HAHA) was also good, with excellent suspense themes put in the right places. All-round, it's a solid soundtrack.

Time for the fun bit - the bad parts, and there are many.

Let's begin with the story, and it was a convoluted crap-fest.

It lacked conviction when it tried to be convincing, it wasn't gripping enough to make me care about what happened next, and it had a messy narrative.

What do I mean by all that? Well, for starters, the twists they tried to make were all so predictable.

It's like they weren't even trying, but maybe that's being a bit mean. Maybe they weren't trying at all and were just in it for the $$ (hence a freaking Allegiant Part 2 in the guise of a different name - "Ascendant").

Speaking of predictability, the movie's antagonist, David (Jeff Daniels), was one of the single most predictable movie characters I have ever seen.

I can't blame Jeff Daniels, however, as it's just a poorly-written character and not a bad acting performance from the comedian-turned-dramatic-actor.

The same can be said for Naomi Watts' Evelyn, who lacked conviction in her quest to bring order to the newly-reformed Chicago. It's just bad writing.

One character I can't blame bad writing on is Peter, as there is good development of his character from the previous movie.

What I didn't like about Peter was Miles Teller's excessively cocky and smart-talking portrayal of the character.

I understand that the character of Peter is supposed to be very cocky and smart-talking, but there is a limit to it.

Along with the cockiness, he tries to be funny with a silly remark or two, and it just doesn't work. It comes off as him trying to get a cheap laugh - and failing at that.

He comes off as annoying and someone you just hope would be killed off in the movie.

The sub-plots they introduce are very uninteresting and feel like story-filler cos they ran out of plot points from half the book to bring to the screen (even though that may not be the case).

They also badly hinder the pacing of the movie (the sub-plot involving Octavia Spencer's character, in particular), as whenever they cut to the sub-plots, it slows the movie down to a halt.

Technically, the movie is not good. To be specific, the camera work.

For a movie of this scale and budget, the last thing you'd expect as a movie go-er is lousy camera work.

In Allegiant, the cameras were so unnecessarily shaky in scenes which weren't even action-filled ones.

Unforgivable stuff.

That just about wraps up my taking a dump on the movie.

One more thing to add - I speak of Allegiant solely on it as a movie.

I haven't read the book nor have I any intention of ever reading it.

I am reviewing Allegiant as it is as a movie, and as a movie, Allegiant fails on many fronts.

I'll leave the review of how Allegiant fares as a book-to-movie adaptation to other people.

All in all, The Divergent Series: Allegiant was a messy and technically disappointing movie, with not enough conviction in its plot to make me care about it once I'm done with this review.

The good cast couldn't save it from disaster. It was quite bad. Very bad.

However, there is very bad and there is Maze Runner: Scorch Trials level of bad.

Mercifully, Allegiant isn't that bad.

2.75/10.