James Dashner’s Maze Runner trilogy of bestselling books began with an elegant premise — amnesiac wakes up in a monster-patrolled maze; must figure out what’s going on — but degenerated into an overly complex and often unsatisfying morass by the third novel. Happily, this adaptation is loose enough to dispense with huge swathes of plot and focus almost entirely on thrills.
There isn’t even an opening title card or voiceover to remind you who’s who, what’s what or how we got to this point as we rejoin the action. You’ll have to gradually piece together that Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) and his friends Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and Frypan (Dexter Darden) have survived the Maze, and teamed up with black marketeer Jorge (Giancarlo Esposito), his ward Brenda (Rosa Salazar) and freedom fighter Vince (Barry Pepper). No time for introductions! All six are engaged in a daring train heist (because you can’t go wrong if you stick close to Fast Five) in order to free the captured Minho (Ki Hong Lee).
Better than we had any right to expect.
That goes largely to plan, but some of their friends, immune to the Flare plague that has devastated the population, are left still in the hands of the all-powerful WCKD organisation, which is alas not a company dedicated to alco-pops. So it’s off through the Flare-zombie infested wilderness to the Last City, a WCKD-controlled stronghold that may hold the key to saving the world, if they can get in and out alive.
The first and second films were one long chase scene, with director Wes Ball and screenwriter T.S. Nowlin stripping the narrative to the bone. This one keeps up the pace but becomes more of a running battle, one so well designed it suggests a much bigger budget than this can possibly have had. Admittedly some of the action can’t help but feel familiar: it’s a mission to get into a heavily guarded place, and then get out while occasionally outrunning monsters. With lots of loose plot-threads still to be tied up — notably the story of their own personal Judas, Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) — even an edited version takes two hours to tell, and it’s hard to sustain tension or scares for that long.
Still, it’s stylishly shot, and sufficiently well cast to carry a little emotion. Given that unpromising source book, and following a delay of well over a year to allow O’Brien to recuperate from a serious injury sustained on set (thankfully he seems fully recovered), you might have expected for this series to fade out the way the Divergent sequels did. But by losing the worst plot elements (psychic links, your time is up), making it look great and focusing on the action, Ball and team have made this better than we had any right to expect.
