MAZE RUNNER SCORCH TRIALS CAST FULL

The kids can’t defeat anyone, or even learn anything, because all that presumably happens in the next film. This is second-in-a-trilogy syndrome, and not at its best – nothing really happens because nothing is allowed to happen.

You feel like the writers are biding their time before bringing all the goodies and baddies back together at the end, and even that culminates in nothing more than a demand for viewers to come back next time. Instead, we’re given a string of largely unrelated set pieces as the script flounders around. Here, you’d hope, the story might pick up.

MAZE RUNNER SCORCH TRIALS CAST FULL

They try their best with a small selection of shoehorned jokes, but there’s not the snappy verbal sparring you might hope for with this many talented actors on display.Īfter spending about half an hour in Janson’s compound, the youngsters end up in ‘the scorch’ – the barren outside world, a place full of disease and desperation. As a result, this impressive young cast struggles to rustle up any chemistry. Instead of talking, they tend to shout ‘run!’ or each other’s names, and don’t really interact in any other way. Meanwhile, everyone else is moaning and groaning. This leads to a handful of fun moments as Gillen hams up his performance as much as possible. He gives them a good telling off when they don’t do what they’re told. Gillen plays his leather-jacket-wearing character like a forlorn teacher on a school trip – he tells the kids when to eat and when to go to bed. The surviving inhabitants of The Glade are helicoptered to a standard-issue sleek young adult sci-fi facility (see: The Hunger Games’ training locations, Kate Winslet’s base from Insurgent), where Aiden Gillen’s villain Janson quickly starts acting a bit shifty. The story picks up exactly where The Maze Runner left it. We may keep our suggestions to ourselves in the future.

Sadly, though, this results in some equally tough-to-follow scenes where the torches keep flashing down the camera lens. Our recommendation? That for the sequel the cast carry some torches. One of our problems with the first film was it was sometimes hard to see what was going on. If there’s one thing to be happy about regarding The Maze Runner’s sequel, The Scorch Trials, it’s that the filmmaking powers-that-be pretty much literally lightened things up.

Maze runner scorch trials cast