Blessed with a natural presence and lots of charisma, Woodley makes for a worthy leading lady, while Theo James broods and smolders in all the right ways as her trainer and love interest. But the film’s bland execution and its muddled message make it hard for you to connect with it.

If The Hunger Games had never happened, then perhaps Divergent would have been a more compelling experience. But this film treads on much of the same ground – dystopian future, gutsy, teenage warrior heroine, dueling factions, an ominous, omnipresent Big Brother style government. Divergent ticks off all the boxes but with far less panache.

Divergent is clearly made for its already existent fan base, with the best loved bits and pieces of the book shoved on to screen with hardly any adhesive to keep them together.

Although the film is action-packed, the special effects are rather cheap and the set design comes across as too artificial to digest. It doesn’t help that every single plot point in the film is predictable and uninteresting. The dialogues are unintentionally funny, as is the serious nature of the actors in silly costumes. It just doesn’t work, and it’s a shame because Woodley deserves a better franchise than this.

Fantasy meets fiction in a dystopian world, and then vanishes into oblivion. Please watch only if the books have appealed to you at some point, but with little expectations.