Scorching pace keeps up in surprisingly good Maze sequel
SOME decades in the future, a virus wipes out most of the human population. Luckily, being a ridiculously photogenic teenager seems to confer some sort of immunity.
For reasons that still escape me, a bunch of those teenagers are rounded up and dumped into a walled garden called the Glade, from which they try endlessly to escape. After a while, a boy called Thomas – and we know he is the chosen one, because he is the handsomest among the group – works out how to beat The Maze that led out of the Glade.
Shortly after which, Maze Runner, the first film in this blockbusting series of young adult adventures, ends.
Maze Runner was exactly the film that fine word ‘‘meh’’ was invented for. It wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t great. It stuck in the mind for about as long as it took me to write up a review on the night and I can honestly say I haven’t thought about Maze
The Maze Runner Runner since. So I walked tonight into the sequel Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials expecting more of the same, if not slightly worse, as second instalments often are.
Gosh, but it’s nice to be wrong. The Scorch Trials hits the ground running and then just keeps on going. Once the expected breakout from the facility we saw at the end of part one has been accomplished, what we are left with is a yarn about a bunch of kids making their way across a blasted landscape to meet up with a mythic army of freedom fighters in the distant mountains.
It’s a very old story, but director Wes Ball and writer TS Nowlin simply stuff the chassis with set-pieces. A brief rest stop in the remains of a shopping mall turns into an edge-of-the-seat zombie chase. The desert itself is beset with deadly sand and electrical storms. What looks like sanctuary turns into betrayal and a deadly trap.
Escaping that leads directly into a foot race up the toppled ruins of a skyscraper which is as good an action sequence as I’ve seen in months.
And just occasionally, The Scorch Trials – as when Ball chooses to shoot a sequence scored to the wildly inappropriate strains of Patsy Cline’s Walkin’ After Midnight – starts to look actually kind of inspired. Much like this year’s Mad Max – a film which grows in my memory with each passing month – Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials is essentially just one long scene, bookended by a minimum of necessary exposition.
Expecting to be underwhelmed by yet another entry in this terminally over-milked genre, instead I walked out grinning. Happy to have a seen a daft film that was still made to be as good as it could possibly have been.
I’ll tell you what: That last Hunger Games instalment better raise the bar. Because, on screen at least, Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials just kicked your over-hyped arse.
Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
JEMAINE CLEMENT is Will, a struggling graphic novelist. Although, unless their characters wear capes or sprout fangs, then I imagine that every graphic novelist is ‘‘struggling’’. But since Will is writing obsessively about the breakup of his relationship with the mother of his adorable 6-year-old twin girls, living in a dowdy one-room apartment and teaching during the day to make ends meet, he fits ‘‘struggling’’ pretty well.
Will didn’t realise his relationship was in trouble until he walked in on Charlie (Stephanie Allyn) post-nookie with her ‘‘friend’’ Gary (Michael Chernus – who looks – in the film’s best unintentional gag – exactly like Rhys Darby would, if Darby ate more pies).
Soon Charlie and Gary are living together and Will has become a weekend dad with a part-time teaching gig and an ever-evolving graphic novel on his desk that is spiralling into unreadable self-absorption. But then things start to look up.
People Places Things is a small film in the very best sense. Much like Will himself, James Strouse’s screenplay walks a fine line between the maddeningly diffident and the enjoyably understated, but mostly stays on the right side.
In the lead, Clement is ably supported by all around – especially Regina Hall, as Will’s potential new love – but essentially carries the film himself. Clement appears in every scene and basically never puts a foot wrong. It’s a good piece of work in a modest, but often very likeable, film.
GEORG ELSER was a talented amateur engineer, a musician, a small-town Romeo and – if 13 Minutes is an accurate account of his life – possibly the bravest man you might never have heard of.
By 1939, Elser had watched for a decade as the Nazis had taken away his friends, had desecrated everything he loved about his German homeland and empowered the most venal and cowardly of his neighbours.
Learning that Hitler was due to talk in a hall that he had some access to, Elser set about constructing an elaborate bomb.
13 Minutes is Elser’s story, as directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (Downfall), with a wonderful eye for the details that are needed to humanise history. 13 Minutes is also one of the most beautifully photographed films I’ve seen in months.
Whether or not the story interests you, purely as an example of quite brilliant film making, 13 Minutes demands to be seen.