Divergent

Directed by Neil Burger

(PG-13)

**

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The movie that topped last weekend’s box-office charts is “almost good enough to make you forget what a cynical exercise it is on every level,” said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. Based on a series of young-adult novels that cribbed their best moves from the Hunger Games trilogy, it creates “a tighter, more believable” dystopian future than the books did. The setting is a Chicago where teenagers are forced to decide which of five social factions they’ll join for life, and Shailene Woodley proves “a likable presence” in the lead role, said Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair. Still, “an action hero she is not,” and when her misfit character decides to join the warrior faction, she provides too little distraction from an “increasingly muddled” plotline about a conspiracy cooked up by the culture’s intellectuals. In the end, Divergent is a dumb movie that at least half the audience should hope “makes major bank,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Until studios finally recognize that young women aren’t a niche audience, the “shoddiness” of this effort will remain standard procedure.