It’s showdown time as Dylan O’Brien leads imprisoned teens to serve the postviral ‘Resistance’ in this final Maze Runner movie.
After a three-year delay – during which time we have all had ample time to forget about the Maze Runner franchise, and maybe get a bit of perspective on the whole YA-teen-dystopia craze generally – the third and final Maze Runner film has clunked off the production line. The action has been souped up and maybe madmaxified a little, but it’s the same-old-same-old, a story that lost its identity once the titular maze was left behind. Thomas(Dylan O’Brien) is the effective leader of those heroic teens of destiny, immune to a virus that once all but destroyed humanity and then kept as lab rats in a maze-walled enclosure to see which of them could best be used to enable humanity to survive.
Now they have escaped, ready for the final showdown; some are imprisoned again, some are free and must come to terms with the perceived treachery of former comrades. The original premise had an eerie and surreal charge: that sinister “glade” walled off by the mysterious labyrinth. There was, arguably, a rigour and clarity to that claustrophobic setting. Once it’s gone, it is just common-or-garden YA action: sexless derring-do in the service of a “Resistance” while the sleek corporate villains in odd sci-fi outfits glide in deathly white corridors. This is at least concentrated dramatically in being brought to an endpoint. For fans only.