Thank the Lord above (or whatever deity you pray to) that Maze Runner: The Death Cure (what a title) wasn’t split into two movies.
At a bloated and overstuffed 142 minutes, Death Cure could have easily been chopped into a two-part finale. That’s usually the trend in Young-Adult novel-adaptations in Hollywood. After Harry Potter proved there was big money in making the last chapter in a series a two-fer, every Tom, Dick, and Katniss got on board, with Twilight and The Hunger Games getting unnecessary extensions to their closing movies. You can make a lot more money off two movies than one.
You can almost picture the alternate universe where Death Cure received the grand swan-song two-parter its YA-contemporaries got. In a world where “Maze Runners” are a national fan base and everyone’s champing at the bit, waiting for a resolution to the adventures of Thomas and Co., a two-movie finale would make all the sense in the world.
But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where the studio executives pushed the last movie of the series into the January dead zone with little fanfare or attention. Death Cure carries not the weight of grand expectations or epic closure, but a sense of dutiful obligation. The cast and crew seem resigned to the fact that their franchise was relegated to the pop culture dustbin before it even properly finished. Everyone’s here to get their work done as efficiently as possible so they can get back to their careers. They just want to get it over with.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t try. The opening scene (a train/car/helicopter heist in the desert) is a virtually dialogue-free scene of slick visual storytelling. It’s simple, but it’s executed with such a level of craft that it’s quite enjoyable. It actually manages to eclipse most of the chase scenes in the recent Fast and Furious movies. It’s nothing special, but it’s decent. That maxim holds true for several scenes in Death Cure. It never dazzles, but it’s often respectable.
Death Cure follows main character Thomas as he attempts to save his friends from the wicked company WCKD (seriously) while they experiment on teens to find a cure for a worldwide plague (if you haven’t seen the first two films in the series, Death Cure does a terrible job of catching you up on the story). He infiltrates their secure city-compound and must contend with new friends, old enemies, and angry revolutionaries led by a goofy-looking Walton Goggins in zombie makeup.
It’s a straightforward plot, but Death Cure draaaaaaaaaags it out. Countless characters regurgitate the same points over and over in endless dialogue scenes. Action moments always go on longer than they should. The last hour is one prolonged explosion-fest that wears the viewer down until they’re begging for the credits to roll.
It’s not all bad, though. Buried in this buffet of a movie are a few choice scenes. The action, while hectic and disorienting, manages to create some inventive moments, such as a bus dangling from a construction crane and the aforementioned train robbery. The lighting is a bit flat, but it occasionally adds a good colour or shadow to a scene. On a technical level, Death Cure is blandly competent.
Dylan O’Brien will probably never be mistaken for a great actor, but he’s solid as Thomas, throwing himself into the action scenes with a nice amount of commitment. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him in the next XXX movie. Aidan Gillen is smarmy as ever as the bland villain, while Patricia Clarkson stands around and drinks whiskey in a nothing role. Walton Goggins and Giancarlo Esposito are great actors, but they’re clearly in “cashing cheques” mode here. Everyone else fades into the background.
Death Cure isn’t a great movie. It’s barely a good one. But its slick professionalism is commendable as it reaches its unheralded finale. It goes softly into that good night while most of the movie-going public forgets it even existed. For its loyal fans, it’s sure to be an appropriate goodbye. For everyone else, it’s an overly-long snoozefest with some unexpected and welcome high points.
