Maze Runner: The Death Cure Review

Remember that time when everyone was raving about this Maze Runner franchise and how everyone was dying of anticipation for this final chapter given how much praise the previous two movies received? Yeah, neither did I. Because no one cares. I actually kinda feel bad for this franchise because it had such a great cast and amazing potential... for the first two-thirds of the first movie. Then they revealed the ending and that completely deflated everything with how boring and cliche it became. The the second movie came out and I don't think anyone remembers that boring piece of cinema. The this final movie was supposed to come a year ago, but Dylan O'Brien got seriously injured on set, forcing them to postpone the movie for an entire year while he recovered, which had the unfortunate side effects of creating enough space to cause everyone to completely forget this franchise existed until trailers started showing up a few months ago. Now "The Death Cure" is officially like that facebook friend who discovers the old trends a year or two late. We all moved on with life, but they're still posting Harlem Shake videos, if you know what I mean. Needless to say I wasn't interested in this at all, but sometimes I can be a completionist, so here we go with a review.

This all started with Harry Potter and Twilight becoming huge things. Since those movies were a success, Hollywood desperately kept searching for the next big YA book series to adapt into movies. We specifically began to hone in on the dystopian subgenre of this thanks to the discovery of The Hunger Games. Then we quickly found out that there's not a whole lot you can do with this genre, but Hollywood kept trying until finally audiences got bored. The finale of The Hunger Games severely underperformed compared to the previous movies in the franchise, but that was nothing compared to the embarrassing death of the Divergent series. "Allegiant," the third of four planned movies, was such a huge box office bomb and critical disaster that the finale was straight up cancelled. They were initially planning to finish it off on TV and attempt a new series, but I highly doubt that is ever going to happen. I feel that this was the nail in the coffin for this genre. But here we are with "The Death Cure" in early 2018. Perhaps this would've been more successful if it wasn't so late to the party, but as is, "The Death Cure" is bombing hard. After finally seeing it following its second weekend in release, I don't feel that bad. Don't let the door hit you on the way out, Maze Runner franchise.

If I'm being honest, I didn't expect much from this franchise to begin with, but when "The Maze Runner" debuted in September 2014, I was pleasantly surprised. For the first two acts. I thought the movie had a great cast and there was a lot of mystery and intrigue surrounding this maze that they were thrown in which also provided a lot of genuinely intense action sequences with whatever the heck was chasing them in the maze. The camaraderie among the group at home base just outside the maze was pretty great. But then they decided to reveal the mystery behind all of this and it turned out to be really lazy. Just another dystopian movie with zero creativity and zero originality. Given that I actually enjoyed a good portion of that movie, though, I went into "The Scorch Trials" a year later with the slight hope that maybe they could get back on track. But man. I don't even fully remember why I hated that movie. But that might prove a point. Despite being let down by "The Maze Runner," I at least remember it vividly. "The Scorch Trails," though... no. It's mostly gone from my memory. I just remember having zero interest in it while watching. I thought about going back and reading my review or reading a wiki synopsis before going to see "The Death Cure." But that didn't happen.

I will say that I don't think "The Death Cure" is an inherently bad movie. When compared to "The Scorch Trials," any movie in the Divergent series (all three were bad) and "Mockingjay Part 2," which broke my heart by being terrible, this is a mostly watchable film. There were a lot of well shot action sequences and everyone in the cast was giving it their all. And the basic premise of the movie had potential. But when push comes to shove, the writers of this finale just had no idea how to finish this off. I haven't read the books and have zero desire to, so I can't say for sure if the root of the problem lies within the novel itself or if it's just a crappy, unfocused adaptation, but my initial prediction is that it could be a bit of both. Yet I can only judge based on what I saw on the screen, so that's my focus here. The basic premise is that most of Earth has been infected by a virus that has turned the population into zombies, even though they refuse to say the word zombie, which is silly to me. Anyways, the arrogant rich people are trying to figure out a cure, but show a lack of respect of humanity with their inhumane experiments on the lower classes. All this has led to just one city left on Earth that is in jeopardy of being destroyed if they don't succeed.

Through all this, our main group of kids has escaped all these shenanigans and are ready to repopulate at a safe heaven across the ocean along with a bunch of other rebels of various ages. But there's a few friends of this group that got recaptured and are being taken back to the city for more experiments. So our lead character Thomas, played by Dylan O'Brien, is dead set on leaving the ninety and nine, so to speak, to rescue the one. Thus we are going back to the city that they spent the last two movies escaping. At it's core, that premise could work. It almost felt like a heist of sorts with a small group of individuals sneaking into a giant building with a master plan on how to steal something. In this case, their friend. Had this movie had any sense of focus, this could've worked. Sneak into the city. Find a way into the building. Rescue their friend as well as any others trapped. Get the heck out of there. Travel to the promised land. Throw in a few moments where the plan fails, causing panic as well as major confrontations with our big baddies and we'd have a solid movie on our hands. But that's definitely not what we did here. We successfully made it through that first step: sneak into the city. But after that, the movie exploded into this big confusing mess.

I should start by pointing out that this movie actually started by making me think I was watching a Fast and Furious sequel. I had a lot of fun with that, despite it being completely ridiculous. I mean, they were stealing a train cart full of people. Not just the people. But the full cart while the people were in it. It was extremely absurd. But a lot of fun. When they realized the person they were looking for was not on that cart, that's when the plan was made to go back to the city. That was all fine and dandy, I suppose. But I bring up the Fast and Furious comparison because every time danger arose, they got out of it in Fast and Furious manner, which got to be a bit silly, especially considering the fact that they were actually trying to make a serious movie as opposed to a purposely absurd action thriller like the actual Fast and Furious movies. Thus there were a lot of lazy plot conveniences with certain people being in the right place at the right time. There were also a lot of crazy action sequences that shouldn't have worked considering the context of the movie and the abilities of the characters. But the writers didn't know how else to write these characters out of these situations, so instead they settled with these insane stunts that didn't make sense.

Yet this isn't even the major problem with "The Death Cure." Given the context of this being a rescue/heist mission sort of movie, the run time should've been 90-110 minutes long. Instead it was 140 minutes long, meaning this movie was quite literally anywhere from 30-50 minutes too long. This felt even longer considering when we got to the city around the end of the first act, the plot became as coherent and focused as a giant plate of spaghetti. There were so many twists and turns in this movie, but not the good kind. Plot just happened. It wandered in directions it shouldn't have or didn't need to. And it kept going. And going. And going. And going. I didn't check the time on my phone at any point in this movie, but there came a point in the movie where my brain told me that we were probably setting up our final action sequence, but instead this played out like a Transformers film in that said "final action sequence" was just the first of many confusing and unnecessary action sequences that weren't needed. I just wanted them to rescue their friend and leave the city. But that was impossible because apparently this movie needed to be as long as a Harry Potter film, despite not even having as close to as much content to justify such a lengthy run time.

When the movie finally decided that it was going to actually end, I spent to reflecting back on a lot of the plot points that happened in the movie and realized that a lot of them were in fact completely pointless. There were a lot of character motivations that I simply didn't understand, especially when it came to our evil masterminds. Decisions were made that I felt betrayed some of the characters or simply didn't need to happen. I think certain sequences were setup to try to make me feel emotion by pulling on my heartstrings. But instead I confusingly said to myself, "Well that was stupid." For posterity's sake I really want to reveal which specific plot points in the movie actually made me physically angry because I feel like this movie will play out like "The Scorch Trials" by making me completely forget about it, but I won't. Just know that there were several moments where instead of feeling the emotion that the movie wanted me to feel, I instead looked at the screen and nearly verbalized the word, "Why?" My conclusions to each of these questions all tied into the general thought that the writing in this movie was horrendous. They had a decent premise and good characters with committed actors, but a writing team that didn't know how to wrap this up.

In concluding this review, I want to repeat that I don't find this to be a straight-up bad movie. The acting in this movie is phenomenal, especially from Dylan O'Brien (Thomas), Kaya Scodelario (Teresa), Thomas Brodie-Sangster (Newt), Rosa Salazar (Brenda), Aidan Gillen (Janson) and another individual who I had no idea was in this movie, so I'll leave the identity a secret for those who actually care and don't want the movie spoiled. Those six actors especially gave it their all. And if we turn off our brain and ignore the incoherent, unfocused plot of the movie that was unnecessarily extended 30-50 minutes, the individual action sequences were extremely entertaining, even if they were also a bit absurd. The visual effects are all fantastic and the cinematography is very well done. So there's a lot of elements in this movie that really worked. But when push comes to shove, this dystopian genre is a worn-out genre with nothing else to give, so I don't think there is a way this movie could've ended that would've completely pleased me, but the writing was so incompetent that it ended up sticking out like a sore thumb and caused me storm out of the theater in a frustrated rage. I could go really low with this score, but I'm feeling nice, so I'm giving this a 6/10.