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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

The Maze Runner

THE MAZE RUNNER (Wes Ball). 113 minutes. Opens Friday (September 19). See listing. Rating: N


An isolated setting. A group of attractive young people. An impossible challenge. A free-thinking hero who dares to push back against the established system. These are the building blocks of every modern young-adult narrative, from The Hunger Games to Divergent to City Of Ember to Harry Potter, and they are exactly what we get in The Maze Runner, as well.

Based on the first in James Dashner’s series of popular YA novels, it stars Teen Wolf’s Dylan O’Brien as Thomas, an amnesiac teen who finds himself delivered by a mysterious freight elevator to a place known only as the Glade. In quick bursts of information, he (and we) get a sense of what’s going on.

Populated by other young men who, like Thomas, know nothing of themselves beyond their names, the Glade is set in the middle of a massive concrete maze. For three years, the kids have been entirely on their own, taking in a new arrival once a month. Every morning, the doors separating the maze from the Glade open every evening, they close. If you’re inside the maze when the doors close, you get eaten by monsters.

The rules are simple enough, right? But Thomas immediately starts pushing against them. He wants to know who built the maze, what the monsters inside really are, the meaning of the acronym WCKD – which appears within the maze and on the barrels of supplies that arrived with Thomas in the freight elevator – and why he keeps having these weird flashes of being in a laboratory with a beautiful young woman (Kaya Scodelario).

Most of these questions are eventually addressed, but the answers are either dopey or ridiculous, requiring first-time director Wes Ball to spend much of the movie stalling for time. Long, presumably meaningful shots show characters staring at that giant maze, and running through it, once Thomas decides to investigate its secrets from within, but not much actually happens. Thomas is perpetually on the verge of learning something important, only to have the larger truths snatched away when someone possessing valuable information passes out or gets eaten.

It’s basically the same strategy that TV show Lost used to string the audience along, but of course Lost had hours and hours to develop its characters and introduce subplots tied to their backstories. Even if we didn’t care about the smoke monster, there was always someone worth following.

The Maze Runner has no such luck, since its characters have no backstories and not much in the way of personality. Thomas is the Chosen One, and everyone else is there to support him or oppose him. (Thomas Brodie-Sangster does a decent job in the former capacity Will Poulter is pretty one-note in the latter.)

Eventually, that young woman shows up as well, and the movie launches into its big climax, which once again involves a great deal of maze running. Then the answers are doled out in an info-dump that makes less and less sense the longer it goes on, ending on a game-changing revelation setting up the next movie.

So, to sum up: The Maze Runner is monotonous, nonsensical, virtually humourless and oppressively grey. It only exists to set up the next one. If that sounds like something you want to see, you’re welcome to it.

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