Movie Review: Maze Runner – The Scorch Trials

These Maze Runner movies don’t eff around. Sequel The Scorch Trials ups the ante in consistently entertaining, pulse-quickening fashion (though pray for the series newcomers, who will probably be left largely puzzled).

Talk about runnin’. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials has raced into cinemas precisely one year after its predecessor debuted. (Was it really so long ago? We were all so young then.)

To the astonishment of literally everyone, that first adaptation of James Dashner’s book series was surprisingly thrilling and even more surprisingly efficient at brutally murdering off its young cast-members. This critic was delighted by its strange imagination as well as the immediacy and relentlessness of its carnage.

The Maze Runner’s awesomely titled follow-up, The Scorch Trials, doesn’t have the luxury of only battling subterranean expectations for our affections.

Director Wes Ball and his actors actually have to do better than before. On that front, eh, they don’t quite succeed, except in their defence, they no longer have the original’s irresistible premise to juice.

(Primer: a bunch of teenagers – all boys, save for one girl - find themselves wiped of their memory and trapped in a nature reserve known as “The Glade”. They get a daily opportunity to bolt into the surrounding maze and seek an exit, fighting off the various nasty creatures populating the labyrinth in the process. Love that hook.)

Still, as the Divergent flicks become increasingly shoddy, The Maze Runner series maintains consistency in quality, violence and weirdness. In the world of YA adaptations, where the bones of so many false-started franchises are covered in dust, this is the only metric we have.

Having freed themselves from the frying pan of The Glade and found themselves in the near-literal fryer – a scorched, apocalyptic planet Earth – the Maze Runner gang begin their second movie in a militarised compound, seemingly safe from the organisation (W.C.K.D.) that initially trapped them.

Outside, the remainder of the human population, beset by zombifying disease The Flare, scratch at its doors.

But who wants to worry about that right now? Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), Minho (Ki Hong Lee), Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and Winston (Alexander Flores) are too busy making new friends with fellow "Gladers" and awaiting transportation to some kind of “flare-free” paradise, as promised by the man in charge, Janson (Aidan Gillen). That this promised land, where they’ll have plenty of room to run and play, sounds precisely like "the farm" elderly dogs are taken never occurs to them.

Eventually, Thomas discovers a conspiracy within the compound’s walls just as vicious as the cruel experiments conducted in The Glade, so our heroes decide to make a break for it and take their chances in “The Scorch” instead.

Sure, zombies whose only motive is to eat human flesh aren’t ideal company for a group hang. At least they don’t keep dangling hope before snatching it away like the adults always do. Maybe this is an attempt at social commentary? If so, it was already covered in Bye Bye Birdie.

Like any decent on-the-road adventure, Scorch Trials has plenty of fun character actors pop up throughout Thomas and company’s journey: Giancarlo Esposito, Barry Pepper, Lili Taylor and Alan Tudyk, in particular. (Patricia Clarkson, the series’ big bad, disappointingly just hangs in the background.)

They add some much needed colour; the kind our capable yet vanilla teen actors just can’t provide.

Ball does well to keep the film feeling lively, despite the episodic nature of the story (adapted ably and leanly by screenwriter T.S. Nolan, who does away with a lot of exposition, meaning those making this their first Maze Runner feature might never actually figure out what’s going on).

It kind of plays out like a video game; specifically, The Last of Us, only in reverse. (Especially the way it explores the value of human sacrifice for the greater good; in both, to find a cure for a dehumanising outbreak.) The late introduction of cropped-hair firecracker Brenda (Rosa Salazar) makes the comparison between the two properties complete.

I love the way the camera moves during the action sequences, dashing alongside the characters with alacrity. It's put to good use during Scorch Trials' many invigorating set pieces, including a torch-lit tear through a zombie-infested shopping center and a nervous climb across a collapsed skyscraper.

Undeniably, however, this is a middle instalment of a much lengthier tale. As dark and emotionally satisfying as the best of these can be – The Empire Strikes Back, The Godfather Part II, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel – even slightly lesser placeholder sequels can make cinema patrons feel as if they're not getting their ticket’s worth.

Scorch Trials has no real beginning and no real end either. It’s just one mad sprint. A fun one, though.

3.5/5

In cinemas now. Rated M for violence, science fiction themes and sustained threat.