You may be forgiven if you, like me, thought about going to see “The Maze Runner: The Death Cure” to catch up on what happened to Shailene Woodley’s character Tris Prior.
Please be advised you have the wrong franchise.
Back in the day of the young-adult-in-peril dystopian trilogies screens were filled with good looking young actors fighting for survival in movies like “The Maze Runner” and “The Divergent Series.” Of the bunch of them only “The Hunger Games” distinguished itself as a go-to movie. The others kind of blended together to form one long post apocalyptic action series that resembled an anti-utopian Guess ad with automatic weapons and artfully tousled hair.
Since the new film, “Maze Runner: The Death Cure,” assumes you’re up to speed with the story I’ll save you the trouble of having to binge watch the first two movies.
Here’s the catch-up:
Based on a series of wildly popular YA books, 2014s “The Maze Runner” sees Thomas, played by “Teen Wolf’s” Dylan O’Brien, plopped into a community of young men surrounded by a labyrinth. The rebellious Thomas wants to see if there is a way to navigate through the ever-changing maze that stands between the boys and whatever is happening in the outside world.
The following year “The Scorch Trials” saw the virtuous Thomas and his gang take on the worst people in the world, W.C.K.D., a group of evildoers that appear to use an Instagram acronym as their name.
After a three-year wait Thomas is back with his stylishly dishevelled hair and chiselled face to break into The Last City, a fortified town where doctors work to find a cure for a plague that turns people into snarling zombies. The good doctors, including Thomas’s former flame Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), are experimenting on the Maze Runners who are immune to the disease. In particular Thomas wants to rescue Minho (Ki Hong Lee), a pal being mercilessly poked with needles in search of a cure.
“Maze Runner: The Death Cure” features lots of ominous music, attractive stars in motion, dusty dystopian landscapes and something gets blown up or shot at every 10 minutes or so. What’s missing is the emotional content that might make you care about Thomas and Company. The movie really wants you to love the characters. The camera endlessly caresses their determined and often tearstained faces but the ham fisted big emotional moments are as empty as the jars of gel thrown in the trash after being used to poof up the cast’s hair. The characters are mannequins mouthing generic dialogue—speeches begin with, “I knew I know you have no reason to trust me,” and every few minutes someone says, “We have to get out of here!”—for two hours and twenty minutes. Think what else you could do with that time!
“Hmmm… it needs a twist, something to make it fresh.”
“How about a young, stoned Jason Bourne?”
“Like Cheech and Chong and Robert Ludlum had a baby? Bingo!”
The movie is three days in the life of Mike and Phoebe (Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart). Young and in love, they live in small town Liman, West Virginia. When she isn’t working at a local bail bond joint and he’s not clerking at a rundown Cash ‘N’ Carry, they spend their days getting high and riffing on Mike’s idea for a comic book about an astronaut ape.
Meanwhile in Langley a midlevel CIA bureaucrat (Topher Grace) is looking to close the file on the abandoned Ultra Program, a government project that offered third strike drug offenders a chance to become part of an experimental program in return for their freedom. They were turned into highly skilled assassins. Trouble was, it didn’t work. The only success story was Mike, but when the pressure got to be too much for him, his memory was wiped and he was given a new identity.
Enter stoned Mike.
For five years he floated through life on a cloud of marijuana with no memory of his former life. When two killers show up in Liman to eliminate him his old instincts kick in and Mike turns from friendly stoner to lean mean killing machine. Still, he doesn’t revert completely. “I have a lot of anxiety about this,” he says as the body count mounts.
At the center of “American Ultra” are Eisenberg and Stewart, reteamed for the first time since 2009’s “Adventureland.” Both are fine actors—if you need convincing watch him in “The End of the Tour” or her in “The Clouds of Sils Maria”—and while neither are stretched as performers, they leave vanity at the door and have fun in the world director Nima Nourizadeh and screenwriter Max Landis give them to cavort in.
Strong supporting work from Connie Britton as Mike’s sympathetic CIA handler balances out the wackier performances by John Leguizamo as Mike’s mile-a-minute drug dealer and laughing killer Walton Goggins. The over-the-top turns fit the feel of the film, but Grace’s shrill sociopath is pitched a bit too high, even for a movie where someone is killed with a dustpan.
The violence in “American Ultra” often feels gratuitous—we’re told Mike singlehandedly kills seventeen people—but the look of stoned amazement that drifts over Eisenberg’s face each time he pulls off some feat of derring-do is worth the wanton bloodshed.
