Maze Runner Death Cure (2018)

In the wake of the success of the Twilights and the Hunger Games, Hollywood was looking for its next big YA series. It failed fairly spectacularly with Divergent. Mortal Instruments went completely unwatched. The Maze Runner has had its tiny niche carved out but certainly didn't make a splash. The Maze Runner movies up to this point have been pretty much just for the fans. Pedantically made and uninspiring with their generically hot young cast of CW show-like actors, nothing about the Maze Runner series stood out and made it special. The series comes to a fitting end therefore with the equally uninspiring Death Cure.

The Maze Runner's story is one of those which sounds like it's all premise ("imagine a teen wakes up in the centre of a maze with no memory and has to figure out how he got there and why?" I imagine the pitch being) that never had a good idea behind it. So they had to patch together the story as it went along and never found anything convincing. It is fairly remarkable how it ends up being both a convoluted mess and a fairly cliched tale at the same time. It pushes no buttons, hits all the traditional marks, and as you leave it's hard to get worked up, emotional, or care much at all.

Death Cure is not terrible and despite it excessive run time doesn't get too boring. It's just not that good. It's so generic and rather meaningless. It's disposable. It's unoriginal.

A great deal of the Hollywood machine is about copying what has worked and trying to recapture it, mostly to fail and make a poor-man's "fill in the blank." Maze Runner has run its course and Hollywood will find the next trend to copy and milk to death.

Maze Runner Death Cure
Starring: Dylan O'Brien, Kaya Scodelario, Ki Hong Lee, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Natalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Aiden Gillan, Barry Pepper, Will Poulter, Patricia Clarkson
Director: Wes Ball
Writer: T.S. Nowlin