Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials

SPOILER-FREE MOVIE REVIEW

I'm just going to jump straight to the point - I am absolutely sick and tired of these dystopian-thriller-teen-nonsense-fantasy-action-adventure movies.

These types of movies have been dominating the film industry's yearly output for many years now, starting with the bloody awful Twilight disgrace-of-a-movie back in 2008.

Since then, we've had a million awful Twilight sequels, The Hunger Games, Mortal Instruments, Divergent and now Maze Runner franchises.

In my honest opinion, I think that's just far too many.

It's reached a point where the only reason why I'm bothering to watch these movies is to just follow the story.

And even in that area, there's a problem.

With every story comes the amount of interest it instills in the viewer.

In the case of the Maze Runner movies, the first one gave me a little bit of interest. Its follow-up, however, completely destroyed all of that interest.

From the start, the movie was already confusing the hell out of me.

Numerous questions popped into my mind, like "How on earth did he end up here," or "What the bloody hell is going on".

This lack of story development or basic storytelling principles was one of the movie's biggest issues - of which there were plenty.

The plot, although relatively intriguing, was full of holes - whether it had to do with continuity from the prequel or just a lack of explanation to the audience of what was happening.

Along with that, there was little or no progress in the development of the characters from the last film, which was very disappointing.

The movie also had a problem in deciding what kind of film it wanted itself to be.

From dystopian-thriller, to prison escape, to zombie apocalypse to war drama, it just couldn't make up its mind.

For the movie as a whole, well, there's seriously not many good things to say about it.

Sure, the CGI was fantastic and the sets were excellent, but once a film starts depending on these irrelevant factors (along with so-called hottie, Dylan O'Brien) to carry it through 132 agonising minutes, then that's just a recipe for disaster.

I wasn't that a big a fan of the first movie, but having watched its sequel, it makes the first one feel as if it was freaking Citizen Kane.

Admittedly, there were a few bright sparks in the form of some of the actors like Dylan O'Brien, Ki Hong Lee, Dexter Darden and Thomas Brodie-Sangster. They gave the film some heart with their great chemistry.

Apart from them, the other characters were all pretty mediocre.

The biggest qualm I had with the characters was with Theresa (Kaya Scodelario) and Janson (Aiden Gillen). They were so painfully predictable and cardboard.

There was also this horrible use of jump-cuts to switch from one scene to another. It was used like twice or maybe more, if my memory serves me accurately.

These jump-cuts were just so jarring and they really took my mind out of the movie.

I mean, what was ever wrong with just moving on to the next scene seamlessly and with explanation as to what was going on?

Jeez, they just HAD to be all "stylish" with this one but it just didn't work. In fact, it made them look cheap and stupid.

It also had the same bloody issue as the first movie, as well as Insurgent, for that matter.

This issue was that the movie kept hinting that it would end at places where it wasn't going to end, leaving viewers really unsettled and frustrated.

To sum it up, Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials was a painfully bad movie. It lacked plot, character and franchise evolvement, quality and substance. Extremely mediocre.

Just one more thing to say - Dear fans of the Maze Runner franchise, don't even bother telling me that I should read the book to fully understand the movie.

To quote a movie reviewer on YouTube (@JeremyJahns), "A movie adaptation of a book should stand on its own to give the viewer all of the information they need. You shouldn't need to read the book to know what's going on in the movie. If that's how the movie plays, then the movie has failed."

Enough said.

2/10