Escapist fare at its finest
(6) MAZE RUNNER: THE DEATH CURE. Directed by: Wes Ball. Starring: Dylan O’Brien, Kaya Scodelario, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Patricia Clarkson, Giancarlo Esposito. Reviewed by: Tim Robey.
PREVIOUSLY on The Maze Runner, there was a maze, and running, and we didn’t know why. The young adult series derived from James Dashner’s books – now brought to a slightly belated conclusion with The Death Cure – has parcelled out its clues with patience and some intelligence, beginning in a mysterious man-made glade with walls on all sides, and building its world ever outwards.
Civilisation is crumbling, the human race prey to one of those zombifying viruses so beloved of post-apocalyptic thrillers, and the dilemma is this: what price the survival of the species?
If it meant imprisoning a bunch of super-agile teenagers, turning their terror levels up to 11, and harvesting an immunogenic serum from their blood, would this really be the done thing?
In terms of their respective position on that, the franchise’s characters are divided into the warring camps “absolutely”, “hell no”, and “I’ll get back to you on that”.
“Hell no”, of course, are the heroes, of whom three from the original glade remain at large, played by Dylan O’Brien, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Dexter Darden.
Their former ally Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) has defected over to Team Absolutely – technically, a corporation called WCKD, which stands for World in Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department, and is represented at the top end by Patricia Clarkson’s chilly scientist Ava Paige, a woman with more immaculate white clothes than any nasty viral epidemic could hope to besmirch. Her lieutenant is a brutal enforcer called Janson, to whom Aidan Gillen brings his wheedling delivery and an air of wanting to chew the heads off minor cast members.
Presently captive in WCKD’s glass spire of a compound-HQ is a kid called Minho (Ki Hong Lee), who is having the toughest time of it, rigged up to some kind of brain-hijacking device which makes him think he’s constantly about to be chomped by hideous, spidery machines called Grievers.
These spectres are a red herring, but good for at least one cuticle-shredder of a set piece. Getting him out of this fortress, and the surrounding, heavily walled sanctuary-metropolis called the Last City, becomes the others’ life-or-death task, but the only logical way in is to work on Teresa’s guilt and get her back on side.
Wes Ball, who directed instalments one and two, has his largest budget yet here and longest running time, but manages to keep a sturdy grip on the steering wheel: this outdoes several of the Har r y Potter films and certainly those Divergent things in terms of rattling through the necessary story points while actually remembering to be exciting when possible. There’s a standout sequence with a bus-load of teens being hoicked by crane, vertically, over the city walls, which is as niftily achieved as anything in Spider-Man. Dialogue is not what you’d call a series forte, but it hits the emotional beats alright, especially in the friendship between the two main boys – O’Brien’s Thomas and Brodie-Sangster’s Newt, whose name isn’t the only thing here borrowed from James Cameron’s Aliens: try a nick-of-time rooftop extraction from an inferno as the whole world’s caving in.
The WCKD expository scenes, all nonsense-science and stern proclamations, are always right on the edge of ludicrous, no matter how much conviction Clarkson and Scodelario can summon between them.
It’s oddly hard to find a resonant message in the story, except those old standbys, sticking by your friends, and generally picking the leader with the sharpest cheekbones.
Still, this comes to a head as a rather more honest proposition than some competing YA juggernauts. The Hunger Games, for instance, was fundamentally about children killing each other, and in deep denial about actually showing that. The Maze Runner knows what it is: escapist fantasy in which everyone has their set of skills. The villains are obvious and some long-lost characters even come back from the deep freeze.
There’s been a three-year wait for fans to get this finale, in part because of a life-threatening injury O’Brien suffered on set. But it wraps things up with confidence and modest style. – The Telegraph