I’ve said two or three times before that any action- or FX-driven thriller using an overhead shot of the lead protagonists (i.e., characters who probably won’t die) jumping off the top of a building or out of a high window almost certainly sucks. It means that the director is either too stupid to realize what a whorey visual cliche this is (skyscraper-jumping first appeared 25 years ago in Tim Burton‘s Batman) or he/she doesn’t give a shit. I’m not exaggerating — a jumping or falling scene in the year 2013 really is a mark of mediocrity. So you can probably rely on Neil Burger‘s Divergent (Summit, 3.21.14) sucking eggs to some extent.

I’m also done with…okay, not “done with” but I’m awfully damn tired of dystopian scenarios. Whenever I read about a new film set in a post-apocalyptic, end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it realm, a part of me delates.

Produced by Lucy Fisher, Pouya Shabazian and Douglas Wick, Divergent is based on a smae-titled novel by Veronica Roth. The screenplay, set in a sci-fi dystopian post-apocalyptic blah-blah version of Chicago, is by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor. Pic costars Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Zoë Kravitz, Ansel Elgort, Maggie Q, Jai Courtney and….wait, Kate Winslet?