Two stars. Rated PG-13, for profanity and relentless action violence
By Derrick Bang
As was the case with last year’s
opening entry in this big-screen franchise, this sequel looks great — the
special effects are quite impressive — and the acting is solid.
But the storyline remains
bonkers-stupid and utterly impenetrable. If last year’s cliff-hanging Maze Runner left us with far more
questions than answers, this second installment doesn’t even try to make sense. It’s as if scripter
T.S. Nowlin abandoned any effort to parse James Dasher’s complicated source
novel, and chose instead to fabricate one superficial chase sequence after
another.
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| Things seem mighty bad, folks ... then again, maybe our heroes should simply stop looking over the next ridge. Try as he might, Thomas (Dylan O'Briend, second from left) can't stop leading his friends ‚ from left, Minho (Ki Hong Lee), Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), Frypan (Dexter Darden) and Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) from one crisis to another. |
When our primary protagonist
Thomas insists, at one point, that he’s tired of running, I cheerfully agreed:
I’m tired of watching him run.
Him and everybody else in this preposterous,
kitchen-sink excuse for a sci-fi thriller.
We’d ordinarily be inclined to
blame Dasher, since his book logically serves as the source material. But
Nowlin’s screenplay bears scant resemblance to Dasher’s novel, perhaps because
the filmmakers are trying to condense a five-book (thus far) series into a more
compact trilogy. Which would have been a reasonable idea, if Nowlin had the
slightest talent for narrative, plot structure or dialogue.
Yep: This is one of those movies
with eye-rolling, melodramatically laughable one-liners, invariably delivered
with utter sincerity. The cast isn’t at fault; everybody does their best ...
but not even seasoned Shakespeareans could wring emotional honesty from these
verbal clunkers.
Such dialogue also frequently
anticipates moronic behavior. “They’re never gonna stop chasing us,” our heroes
lament, having narrowly escaped a massive land- and air-based search party. So
what do they do next? They take a long walk across a wholly exposed desert
landscape, where — based on what happened just a few scenes earlier — they’d
clearly be spotted and captured.
But no: Apparently the bad guys
decided not to look that day.
On top of which — and this is Dasher’s fault — I still can’t get
beyond his internal technological inconsistencies. Consider the engineering
ingenuity and sheer brute manpower that would have been required to build,
maintain and operate the massive maze that initially trapped our young heroes.
Now ask yourself whether such structures could have been fabricated so quickly
— because we now know there were numerous mazes — given the timeline of events
as established via maddeningly brief flashbacks.
And, more crucially, to what purpose, precisely? Two films in,
and we’ve still no clue as to the original maze’s intent.
On top of which, we’re once again
forced to accept a truly dismal picture of human nature under stress: a degree
of “civilized” behavior so barbaric, so abhorrent, that it frankly defies
description. That’s not merely sad; it’s also loathsome.
