Perhaps we’ve been spoiled by the high quality of “The Hunger Games” series, traumatized enough by the ridiculousness of the “Twilight” franchise or are still holding our breath for what J.K Rowling will come up next, but more and more it feels as if “young adult” adaptations need to do more than just “show up” in order to satisfy our ever-growing expectations. When Shailene Woodley was cast in “Divergent”, the filmmakers seemed to be on the right path to providing us with something special. The rising young starlet stole each of her scenes in “The Descendants” and broke our hearts in “The Spectacular Now”, but as Tris, the leading character in the first film based on Veronica Roth’s books, she doesn’t fare as well.

Set in a futuristic Chicago, cut off from the rest of the world by a giant fence (ahem sequel), the plot centers on Tris’ discovery that she doesn’t belong to any of the five factions her world is divided in. She’s too outspoken to belong in Abnegation, too stubborn to be part of Amity...and you get the drill (it doesn’t help that the factions remind lazy students of why the SATs are being modified). After her test results reveal she is in fact Divergent (i.e. “a plain, good old fashioned human being”) she goes into hiding by joining Dauntless, the faction in charge of guarding her city. To think that she joined this group to be near the muscular, cocky men would make sense if this film had anything to do with actual human behavior, but in a universe where everyone’s actions seem to be guided by larger-than-life concepts, and everyone speaks as if they know they’re playing specific archetypes, the idea of hormonal teenagers is just impossible to fathom.

Therefore the film gives us 139 torturous minutes of endless exposition, speechifying and lackluster action sequences set to Ellie Goulding songs. “Divergent” is populated with scenes that have worked better in other movies and a who’s who of up-and-coming actors (hey, it’s Miles Teller! And there’s Zoe Kravitz!) but everything seems too calculated. Tris gets a love interest (in the shape of the lusciously-lipped Theo James of “Downton Abbey” infamy), kick-ass parents (“Double Jeopardy” alumni Ashley Judd and Tony Goldwyn) and even a worthy enemy (Kate Winslet joining the ranks of Melissa Leo and Jodie Foster in the “Oscar winning actresses cast in thankless sci-fi bureaucrats parts” club) who is trying to eradicate her kind and take over the world, but Tris never gets what matters the most in these kinds of movies: a personality.