As a resistance leader, he appears with several layers of "crank" make-up and without his nose, and manages to turn the dial up from low-level mob boss to Fury Road war boy in the meager time he's allotted. It's Walton Goggins who is this installment's big surprise. Though the series' young leads all do an admirable job (particularly Salazar, in a relatively thankless role), their older counterparts tend to steal scenes right out from under them. Though the franchise might be a little more grown-up than its peers (it's certainly more violent, and not in a way that feels false), it still runs on a black and white metric.Īs the film's big bad, Janson, Aidan Gillen is terrific as always, and is also one of a frankly impressive roster of character actors who've dropped in and out of the franchise to spice things up (the previous installment notably boasted Lili Taylor and Alan Tudyk, and Giancarlo Esposito and Barry Pepper are holdovers). It's all for good and evil, and In those terms, WCKD is evil, and that's that.
It's the emotional throughlines that carry the movie - the love triangle between Thomas, Teresa, and Brenda ( Rosa Salazar), for instance, or Thomas' commitment to keeping all of his friends safe, which is what leads him back to WKCD in the first place instead of just up and escaping. To wit, Thomas's erstwhile love interest, Teresa ( Kaya Scodelario), has defected to join them, as they seem to be the only people with the resources to be able to research and then develop an effective cure and prevent the rest of the world's population from succumbing to a virus that turns them into zombies, or, in Maze Runner vernacular, "cranks."Īrguably, though, this isn't really a movie that cares all too much about the logistics of the plot. Despite their obviously evil branding (WCKD is pronounced as you'd imagine, i.e. This is where things start to fall apart. He's sought by WCKD, the government agency responsible for putting the maze in Maze Runner, as they believe they might be able to find a cure for the virus in his blood. Dylan O'Brien stars as Thomas, who represents humanity's last hope as one of a select few teenagers immune to the virus that sent the world into a tailspin. Luckily, there's nothing in the plot that can't be put together with a little patience and a few context clues.
The Death Cure is committed to moving things along at a clip to the point that there's basically no exposition whatsoever, which may throw people who didn't watch the first two Maze Runner movies (or just forgot what happened in them) for a bit of a loop. That's not, it should be noted, for lack of trying.