Maze Runner [2]: The Scorch Trials (2015)
Action | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Tagline: The maze was just the beginning.

There's more action, more excitement, and more spectacular effects in this thrilling new chapter of the epic Maze Runner saga that's taken the world by storm! They may have escaped from the Maze, but Thomas and his fellow Gladers now face a greater challenge: searching for clues about the secret organization known as WCKD. Their journey leads them to the Scorch, a desolate wasteland filled with unimaginable dangers. The mystery deepens at every turn as the Gladers work together to discover their purpose and battle to survive in this must-see, electrifying adventure!


Storyline: In this next chapter of the epic "Maze Runner" saga, Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) and his fellow Gladers face their greatest challenge yet: searching for clues about the mysterious and powerful organization known as WCKD. Their journey takes them to the Scorch, a desolate landscape filled with unimaginable obstacles. Teaming up with resistance fighters, the Gladers take on WCKD's vastly superior forces and uncover its shocking plans for them all. Written by 20th Century Fox

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, December 17, 2015 -- Some viewers may feel themselves in somewhat the same predicament as Thomas (Dylan O'Thomas) did at the beginning of The Maze Runner as that film's sequel Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials gets underway, thrusting the audience into a noisy, confusing environment where not a lot seems to be making sense. This second entry in the Maze Runner franchise is stuffed to the gills in its early going with all sorts of specific verbiage like Gladers, Cranks, Flare and WCKD (pronounced "Wicked", just in case anyone was wondering, in just one indication of the franchise's lack of subtlety), which may leave some audience heads spinning as they attempt to either figure things out in media res or perhaps reacquaint themselves with Thomas and his band of merry (?) maze runners. In one way, the film's opening is deliberately chaotic, amply documenting the kids' confusion as they find themselves in an alien environment after having escaped the rigors of the labyrinth. Screenwriter T.S. Nowlin (adapting James Dashner's Young Adult skewed novels) and director Wes Ball (both repeating their roles from the first film) actually begin the film with a dream sequence which seems perhaps intentionally reminiscent of wintertime concentration camp scenes offered up in another famous franchise, X-Men: The Complete Collection. That turns out to be a memory of Thomas' which provides a bit of a clue as to his past, while also all too obviously pointing the way forward to what will ultimately be a bookending scene which offers a "callback" to this very sequence. That structural artifice is perhaps the best indication of how rote Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials often is. The film is still viscerally exciting at times, but it takes quite a long time to actually kick into high gear, and even then the story tends to progress in fits and starts, very much like a maze runner desperately trying to get from point A to point B without having much of a clue as to how exactly that should be accomplished.

It's basically out of the fire and into the frying pan for Thomas and his bunch of comrades (which includes a character named Frypan) as Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials gets underway, and that's even before the group of youngsters is thrust out into a barren, sun soaked wasteland that contains the remains of a once vibrant cityscape. Before that section of the film arrives, Thomas finds himself in a kind of industrial lair which is being managed by the apparently kindly Mr. Janson (Aidan Gillen), though any armchair scenarist is going to see right through that "apparently" from virtually the first moment Janson appears on screen. Janson is supposedly offering temporary shelter to not just Thomas' crew, but a whole host of other refugees from a bunch of other mazes (one of several plot points the film never addresses is how exactly all of these maze runners broke out of their confinement at more or less the same moment). Janson assures the kids that they'll soon be transported to safety at some sylvan paradise somewhere, though (again) prescient viewers will sense that something a bit more nefarious is up as little groups of teens are called by Janson to prepare for their exit from their metallic fortress to an ostensible life of freedom and sunshine.

This whole section of the film is overly drawn out, taking up over a half hour of the proceedings, when it's obvious from a very early point that Thomas and his friends are not in the arms of safety and have in fact probably wandered directly into a WCKD holding cell of a certain type. There's an oddly languorous rhythm to this opening act, especially after a knock your socks off first couple of minutes as Thomas awakens from his dream to find himself literally pulled into a maelstrom involving invading Cranks (the zombie like victims of the virus known as Flare). The "reveal" that's offered shortly before Thomas and his gang break out into the "real" world is creepy enough, but is also fairly predictable, and seems downright derivative of any number of other films like Coma or even Soylent Green which exploit certain "harvesting" tendencies.

The film's energy level receives a much needed jolt of adrenaline once Thomas and the rest of the former Gladers get out into the Scorch, where they have to deal not just with the detritus of the planet's former centers of civilization, but with more "mundane" threats like Cranks and the more technologically dangerous forces of WCKD who are pursuing the kids for aims which are not immediately clear even if they're at least fairly discernable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some characters fall victim to the teethy Cranks, while Thomas manages to figure out that there may indeed be remnants of an actual society roaming around the hills, as evidenced by gruff but lovable Jorge (Giancarlo Esposito) and his acolyte Brenda (Rosa Salazar).

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials clocks in at over two hours, and the film often feels bloated and unnecessarily burdened with sidebars. It also suffers from having to rely on silly moments like the climactic appearance of Jorge just when Thomas seems to have no other option than to take himself and a bunch of other Gladers out of commission (as in permanently out of commission) in order to stop the supposedly villainous activities of Ava (Patricia Clarkson). In fact the character of Ava is a distillation of what tends to suck some of the emotional energy out of this franchise—there's absolutely no nuance to the plight of this ostensibly well intentioned if ultimately devious woman, when a bit of subtlety in how the character is presented might have helped to establish the "hard choices" various power groups had to make to ensure the survival of Mankind. Instead, everything is boiled down to what basically amounts to White Hats vs. Black Hats, and while that may suffice at a gut level (perhaps especially for that all important Young Adult audience), it keeps the film from ever seeming like much more than a live action cartoon.

The problem with running a maze is—one wrong turn, and you're right back where you started. The same might be said of this very franchise, for as I mentioned in the The Maze Runner Blu-ray review, some audience members may feel they've run this particular gauntlet without ever really getting anywhere. The film could have been judiciously trimmed by at least 15-20 minutes, and the first act considerably tightened, both of which might have helped to achieve a bit more dramatic momentum as things progressed into the Scorch. A silly and overly hyperbolic final few minutes also don't help much, but the film is at least buoyed by impressive production design and some artfully staged set pieces, as well as by an expected professionalism on the part of the large (and frequently quite young) cast. Fans of the franchise will probably be willing to overlook this second outing's shortcomings, but the third film had better finally offer a route to resolution, rather than rehashing the same old conflicts over and over again. Technical merits are very strong, the supplemental package nicely varied, and (with caveats noted) Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials comes Recommended.

[CSW] -2.3- I guess that if you're younger than 25 this movie might have some great appeal for you, maybe. It had all the trappings of adolescence without the attractions that usually accompanies puberty. I liked the first movie, and having to figure out what was going on, how our heroes would make it. This movie had none of that. The young cast does a fair job. However, O'Brien is starting to get annoying in this movie as the protagonist Thomas. Everyone follows him but he is not exactly a good leader. He is impulsive, petulant and does what he wants to do. Well, maybe that's what young adults view as a leader. It has plenty of action and a good soundtrack but those things can only partially make up for the thin plotline and the overly long run time.
[V4.5-A5.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box codes were available at the time of this rental but they are available now.

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