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Unable to distinguish itself in any way from its young-adult science-fiction counterparts, Divergent: Allegiant Part 1 spends every second of its two hours dragging out what it calls a plot as a way of setting up the entirely unnecessary final installment.
Allegiant was intended to be anchored by a joyless and uninspired love story that features zero chemistry between its romantic leads. Instead, we don't give a fuck about either of them, so we don't give a fuck about their love story. The real story here involves relieving cinema-going teenagers of their disposable income and ensuring that they return next year to see the FOURTH one of these. It doesn't look promising either.
The film's excessively dull proceedings are punctuated by generic and sanitized action scenes where the Bureau of Genetic Welfare uses a bunch of weirdo future army shit to kidnap little kids and wipe their brains for research projects. Multiple characters are shot point-blank in the head, but there's not a single drop of blood. To ruin the unsavable climax: Shailene Woodley's Tris steals this cheap-looking bad-guy bubble ship (to fly back to Chicago for some reason) that she doesn't know how to pilot. Flying the ugly ship upside down along the hot pink desert floor, its roof scraping along the sand at three hundred miles an hour while the other kids inside scream bloody murder, she suddenly says "Oh, I've got it," flips it over, and instantly flies like a boss to Chicago.
The computer-generated effects, which are competent at best, can't save the equally uninspired and garish production design, which oscillates between two locations: "Hot Pink Nuclear Wasteland" and "Ugly Future City." All of the CGI (blown-out Chicago, giant research city, holographic camouflage wall, automated drone systems) looks lifted out of a 1994 episode of Babylon 5, with undefined, smeary textures and cheap, low-resolution rendering that makes this big-budget "event" movie look like a shitty BBC television show.
A sleepy-eyed Jeff Daniels on auto-pilot plays a diffused imitation of his father-figure type villain from 2012's Looper. Still, Daniels is easily the best thing in a film constructed entirely of stereotypes. If you are over seventeen years old there is exactly zero reason for you to waste your money on this. Teenagers will love it anyway, and I guarantee that it will make a shitzillion dollars. PG-13. MIKE GALLUCCI.
Critic's Grade: D
Willamette Week