Just when Donald Trump has turned the walled city of future Chicago from “Divergent” into an accidental political metaphor, Shailene Woodley’s Chosen One of this interminable young-adult saga packs up and moves to what remains of O’Hare International Airport on the city’s outskirts. If you’ve ever found a layover at O’Hare stultifying, it’s a a positive joy compared to what happens there in “The Divergent Series: Allegiant,” the third installment of four films derived from Veronica Roth’s dystopian novels. By this point, none of the pieces fit and absolutely nothing makes any sense. Woodley and the other cast members plodding their way through the inanities and plot craters of “Allegiant’’ make, say, Chris Christie look positively perky. The Chosen One, Tris, ventures beyond Chicago’s walls with intensely vacant boyfriend Four (Theo James) and the increasingly annoying Peter (Miles Teller) — as well as the underutilized duo of Christina (Zoë Kravitz) and Caleb (Ansel Elgort) — to find a despoiled land utterly at odds with the verdant fields depicted at the beginning of the first film. They are taken on what amounts to an armed airport shuttle to meet with David (Jeff Daniels, no doubt subsidizing his current run on Broadway), a high-ranking officer of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare, who blathers on about how “pure’’ Tris’ genes are. (Left to right) Zöe Kravitz, Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Theo James, Miles Teller and Maggie Q.Photo: Murray Close And then he shows how she was kidnapped from her parents in “the fringe’’ and brought to Chicago to be raised as part of a sinister-sounding “experiment’’ whose aims are never really made clear. David is the sort of character who loudly chuckles when Tris asks if she should trust him — and this supposedly smart heroine stupidly trusts him anyway. On a trip to the Providence, RI, airport (presumably we visit JFK in next year’s finale, “Ascendant’’) to meet with the Bureau’s board of directors, Tris learns that what David really wants is funding for a nutty plan to end the civil war between the former Chicago factions headed by Evelyn (Naomi Watts) and Johanna (Octavia Spencer). While the faction business was getting pretty tired — I couldn’t tell you for the life of me exactly what these two groups are fighting over — the special effects this time around do slightly exceed the pretty low standard set in the first two films. Certainly, no one goes to these films for the stiff acting — and the exposition-to-action ratio in “Allegiant” is dangerously low. A lot of the talk concerns the fact that, as part of his experiment, David has equipped Chicago with pipes to dispense memory-erasing gas. Why exactly would he do this? And precisely why would David install a system that could only be operated from inside the city, when he has an elaborate surveillance system so he can watch everything from O’Hare? By the time David gets someone to unleash the gas, I was wishing he could simply erase all memories of the sorry “Divergent’’ franchise.
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