You’re forgiven if you have a hard time keeping straight all these young-adult, dystopian, post-apocalyptic multi-volume novels that keep getting made into extended movie franchises.

“The Hunger Games” is the one about kids who have to kill each other for sport in order to quell incipient rebellions against the privileged class.

“The Maze-Runner” is about dozens of young people who have their memories erased and are forced to live together inside a walled-in enclosure. The maze-runners
try to escape and run smack dab into the privileged classes.

In the “Divergent” series, humanity is divided into five factions, all of whom work separately from each other to ensure peace. Divergents are the ones who don’t fit nicely into any one category and so are hunted down as criminals.

“Insurgent” is the second installment of a planned four-film “Divergent” franchise.

Like “The Hunger Games,” the central character in Divergent is a young woman who almost inadvertently leads a rebellion against the prevailing social order.

“The Hunger Games” has more layers to it, and more characters, but as far as premise, I prefer Divergent’s Brave-New-World scenario. If only the storyline lived up to the premise.

To quickly recap, the world (or at least, Chicago) has been divided into five factions: Erudite (the intellectuals), Candor (the brutally honest), Dauntless (the fighting class), Amity (hippie farmers), and Abnegation (those who live entirely for others.)

“Insurgent” opens with Erudite Kate Winslet in charge and working with the Dauntless faction to find a secret artifact containing crucial directions for the future of society. (Can you say MacGuffin?) The trick of the movie is that only a Divergent can unlock the strange box’s contents.

“What do you think is in that box, Caleb?” asks Tris.

“I don’t know, but she’s testing Divergent, searching for the one who can open it.”

As it turns out, there’s only one Divergent that’s up to the task of cracking the artifact’s code, our heroine Tris Pryor, played by Shailene Woodley.

Most of the movie consists of her doing her best to avoid capture by the Erudite/Dauntless tag team and then eventually facing the challenges presented to her by this mysterious box. It’s a kind of metaphorical Rubik’s cube of computer simulations and the way the film handles them is quite clever, if not exactly ingenious.

Unfortunately, what is intriguing in the film is constantly interrupted by arbitrary action scenes – firefights and skirmishes, surprise raids and full-on battle attacks.

And after nearly every one of these action interruptions, with Tris seemingly backed into another impossible-to-escape corner, someone or something comes to her rescue, more and more improbably.

Inevitably, “Insurgent” starts feeling like a lame action movie interrupted with occasionally interesting ideas rather than the other way around.

The “Divergent” series has two more shots to get this right, but I’m afraid it’s going to take something as improbable as one of Tris’ out-of-left-field rescues to make this franchise worth it.