El corredor del laberinto: La cura mortal

Maze Runner keeps up the standard even in the finale. The runners run, traitors betray, and the mutants eat people. A new setting, this time urban, neon and laboratory-like is impressive. Very good action and a very impressive final, Ball certainly doesn’t fear the larger formats and I hope that next time he chooses a more interesting screenplay. The death cure isn’t quite as terrible as most “youth movies", but it does have a few WTF moments, as well as twists coming out of nowhere. Luckily this is all framed by shootouts, car chases and looks really good. The happy ending is a little heavy-handed. If they had cut it a bit differently, it would have been super. (30.01.2018)

Torture movie and textbook blockbuster at the same time, in the most pejorative sense. Hard to find something so lazy and uninspiring. The story only moves through dei ex machina, the characters have no characters, they're all the same, the future world isn't achieved with a single technological innovation, the futurism is dictated by sleek building design and a bunch of blue monitors, the film speaks for the most part only in short sentences and without any emotional expression. The absolute record breaker is Dylan O'Brien, who I suspect never returned to the set after his injury and was replaced by a poor-quality digital copy, for which they didn't have the money to do motion capture on his face. It's usually fun to pick out the improbable coincidences and screenwriting crutches in a film. Maze Runner: The Death Cure is made up of nothing but. Even the first scene with the train ambush, which takes place while the train is moving, ends with the cars getting unhooked and the train slowly coming to a stop a meter away at the exact spot where the hidden rebels are waiting. When a badass drives off with a bus full of Immunes in a wild chase through the city, she only gets stopped by a police roadblock at the exact spot where a crane awaits her, which drags the bus incredibly stupidly to safety. The whole "the heroes are almost trapped, but suddenly a character who's not supposed to be there shows up and saves them" method is repeated to exhaustion. At the end, a war breaks out in the city streets, with entire skyscrapers falling to the ground, but the film doesn't show it, we only see the aftermath from a distance. It's a terrible, horrible, smoldering, moss-covered bore. I even frantically had to listen to the director and screenwriter commentary for a moment, simply because I couldn't believe they would be able to discuss this except in apologies. In the end, the commentary pretty much made sense "Yeah, we shot this scene in the Kalahari desert. It's looks kinda cool. You know, like, they're attacking a train, but not on horses, but in cars. I don't know, it's cool." A point at least to the Czech distributor, who guessed the potential of the whole work and gave it the apt title Death Treatment in the Czech version, a throwback to the 90s translations of titles that were always either "Death Something" or "Something Death". (01.05.2018)

I would like to officially apologize to the second part for how I badmouthed it, and I really wish someone would erase my memory and only let me remember that there is only the unmatched first part that shook my movie life. If the second part was action-free with more horror elements and served more as a necessary connection between the first and the third part, the third one is a total burial of Maze Runner and its whole concept. I have always believed that when something is good, it should not be unnecessarily inflated with crap. And what did we see in the third part? Uninteresting action, predictable plot, pathetic twists, a few dead characters, and a totally boring conclusion to this questionable trilogy that naively started us off with its first part. Even the Hunger Games had a more commendable start after their initial flop. I really have almost nothing to praise about it. It was just one big lab boredom; forget about any adventure here. (19.04.2018)

Although the first installment never managed to fully harness the power of the present moment, I am very satisfied. The escape to four years prior exploited the premise of unfamiliar space, danger, and characters to the maximum and managed to surprise you with ironclad regularity. After revealing what it was all about, the key ingredients had to be taken elsewhere, whether in surprisingly grand exteriors or a plethora of supporting characters. And at the moment when Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Co. step into the finale, they are a bit unlucky as they resemble their counterparts from the young adult genre, especially Hunger Games, and to a lesser extent, the (unfortunately never filmed) finale of the Divergent series. Once again, they are heading into the lion's den, towards final confrontations and fateful dialogues amidst deadly chaos. And even in the case of The Death Cure, everything falls perfectly into place despite painful losses or seemingly exaggerated action scenes involving a handful of heroes against a multitude of enemies. The emotional and action aspects are even more balanced than in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, which was filled with new characters. Although I would have liked the entire trilogy to become an even bigger commercial hit, I am ultimately satisfied that despite production difficulties, it managed to speed through to the last chapter. And by express train. (31.03.2019)

Third visit to the cinema. A decent ending to a three-part teen saga that doesn't offend and definitely has something to offer in the cinema. The opening action set-piece is one of the best sequences of the film, it makes you feel you are watching a snippet from a Fast and Furious movie, but the other action scenes are also good, especially in the zombie tunnel where Wes Ball conjures a thick horror atmosphere, or the chase with the robot spider, or the finale, which could have been more destructive for my taste. Wes Ball is going to make a proper horror film next, and here he manages to solidly create tension and anxiety in a few scenes, so I'm starting to root for him. Decent entertainment that's nice to watch. 75% (02.02.2018)