This film is making a wheezing, spluttering sound: the sound of a profitable YA franchise running out of steam. It is the worryingly tedious follow-up to the first Maze Runner, and now our bunch of teen heroes are out of the Glade, that strangely uninteresting grassland where, in future times, they had been mysteriously walled up and surrounded by a maze, and are now in a grim post-apocalyptic CGI landscape called the Scorch, menaced by the sinister controlling organisation WCKD, unsubtly pronounced “wicked”.
Just as in certain types of romantic comedies, you come across the stock character of the Manic Pixie Dream-Girl, so here we come across the Manic Pixie Dystopian Whiteclad Matronly Empress, played here by Patricia Clarkson, as Ava Paige, rather similar to the character Kate Winslet played in Divergent. There’s even a zipline-pulley scene, just like Divergent. The continuing franchise has squeezed the initial premise dry.
