Movie Review: 'Maze Runner: The Death Cure'

The problem with the first two movies in The Maze Runner franchise was simple mediocrity and blandness. The films weren’t terrible, they weren’t poorly made; the movies’ just didn’t leave much of an impression. The expansive, bland but handsome teen cast was too large and not well developed enough as individuals to be memorable and lead Dylan O’Brien wasn’t bad either but the script did him few favors.

Now that we arrive at the final movie in the franchise, Maze Runner: The Death Cure, we get the first genuinely bad entry in the series. The Death Cure is an utterly moronic and misguided action movie that relies heavily on you remembering the two previous movies which may not have been terrible but were far from memorable. And on top of the homework the producers expect you to do in order to follow the plot; the film is 2 hours and 25 tedious minutes long.

Maze Runner: The Death Cure opens with an incredibly poorly staged action sequence. Our hero Thomas (O’Brien) and his allies are attacking a train owned by the evil, post-apocalyptic corporation WCKD, pronounced Wicked. I assume the evil corporation is called Wicked just in case the audience is dumb enough not to realize who the bad guys are.

Thomas and his team are here to rescue their friend Minho (Ki Hong Lee) whose name changes at least seven times throughout the movie, depending on which character is talking. I’m not kidding; at various points in the movie, Minho is called Minnow, Mean-Ho, and Meano. My best guess is that his name is pronounced Min-Ho but I can’t be sure about that. I spent a good deal of time considering the name because I had little else holding my interest.

I am still describing the first five minutes of this terrible movie and already I am desperately distracted. Anyway, Thomas and his team are trying to save Minho and fail miserably when they steal a plane and then rescue the wrong train car full of children who were to be experimented upon by WCKD. On the bright side, there are two characters from the second Maze Runner movie who were on the car they rescued but I will be damned if I remember them and they are done in the movie once they are rescued and acknowledged.

Having failed to save Minho, Thomas decides he will go it alone to follow the train tracks to the place where Minho is now being held, a futuristic city that somehow sprung up in giant skyscrapers amidst a zombie plague apocalypse that somehow destroyed the rest of the world. The timelines of these movies are so convoluted that I can’t possibly explain how they work.

Thomas and his friends were in the maze three years ago, I think. The maze had existed for the kids who were there before Thomas for a couple of years, perhaps. The plague has been going on long enough that warring factions of humans and humans turned into bloodthirsty zombies have destroyed all but one city in all of America or the world or somewhere. This universe is not particularly well laid out. Oh by the way, shove your book-based explanations. The movies need to stand on their own and they don’t.

So the plot rolls on revealing the city that apparently survived or was built during the plague, which was very unclear. There is an attempt at allegory as the poor and infected are locked out of the gleaming city and forced to survive on scraps in a pseudo ghetto which is run by a crazy character actor. The allegory about the rich versus the poor is set up and abandoned because.... who cares?

For those who are not aware, all post-apocalyptic ghettos in movies have one crazy character actor that is somehow in charge of them through some kind of wacky character actor powers. In Maze Runner: The Death Cure it’s Walton Goggins hamming it up to Jeremy Irons levels of cheese. Goggins plays his character with wild bugged out eyes, a robotic limping leg, and makeup that removes his nose because.... who cares?

Also in this ghetto is "character from the first movie everyone thought was dead" but isn’t, played by Will Poulter. My memory isn’t good enough nor did I care enough to go back and find out for myself, but apparently Poulter’s Gally went evil in the first film and had to be killed by his fellow Maze Runners only they didn’t kill him and he’s alive because twists are what bad screenwriters live for.

Gally will get them into the city and into WCKD headquarters because wacky character actor has a secret tunnel into the city. If you’re wondering why wacky character actor hasn’t simply used his secret tunnel, which he took time to wire and light, to storm into the city and launch the violent revolution that has been building at the only gate into the city, neither I, nor the movie, has the answer. It’s especially strange because wacky character has amassed an arsenal that includes rocket launchers that can destroy an entire city; what’s he been waiting for?

Maze Runner: The Death Cure is filled with these mind blowing gaps in logic. During the train sequence the main characters are able to use torches to uncouple the prison train while a plane hovering overhead drops a chain down to lift the train only the characters didn’t know they were stealing a hover plane and thus could not have planned for this. Meanwhile, the bad guys on the train take about a good 20 minutes to run the length of a football field and don’t bother stop and start shooting and then when they do, the plane, instead of using its giant guns, just hovers their and hopes that the good guys on the ground don’t get shot. We can see the giant guns, shoot the bad guys moron!

The idiocy of Maze Runner: The Death Cure is non-stop. I mean, just look at the title! The Death Cure? Does it cure death? Are the characters soon to be immune to death? I was under the impression they were curing a plague that turned humans into zombies but the title seems to indicate that they are in fact curing death. Spoiler alert: a lot of people die in this movie so that "Death Cure" is pretty useless.

I could go on and on about how moronic Maze Runner: The Death Cure is, especially the deeply stupid script which has characters holding on to a moving train and one character says to another character: "Hold On." Great advice, dumbass, I was just gonna fall off until you jumped in with that brilliant advice. Later, the same character reminds other characters to "Get Down" when bullets begin flying overhead. GAH!!!!!!!!!

Like I said, I could go on for a while with how stupid Maze Runner: The Death Cure is. In fact, I could recommend Maze Runner: The Death Cure as a movie worth riffing with friends. Maze Runner: The Death Cure is so inept and so braindead that you could have a whole lot of fun with some funny friends, a few beers and openly making fun of this terrible movie. I don’t recommend seeing Maze Runner: The Death Cure unless you plan to riff it and post it to YouTube.