Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials runs on empty

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials is the next offering in a line of young adult film franchises featuring teenage heroes fleeing sinister adult despots across dystopian terrains.

Compared with other series in the genre such as Hunger Games and Divergent, the first Maze Runner film showed a modest degree of originality. Dr. Paige (Patricia Clarkson) and her organization, WCKD (W.I.C.K.E.D. in the James Dashner novels on which the films are based), erased the memories of a group of boys, dumping them in a grassy field surrounded by a high wall. The boys endeavored to unlock the mystery of their abduction and outdoor imprisonment. Eventually, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) led his co-captives through a monster-filled maze outside the wall, but they wound up in WCKD’s lab. There the boys, mysteriously immune to a virus that had wiped out most of the earth’s inhabitants, learned they were subjects of WCKD’s experiments.

Scorch Trials (rated PG-13 for extended sequences of sci-fi violence and action, thematic elements, substance use, and language) picks up inside WCKD’s cavernous facility, where Thomas meets runners from other maze-trials. Led to believe WCKD is releasing the runners, Thomas and his close friends nevertheless discover hundreds of their peers suspended by wires and tubes in a comatose state. WCKD is harvesting the blood of the “Immunes” to manufacture large quantities of an antidote to the virus. To WCKD, the “kids” (as they often refer to themselves) are nothing more than research material.

Thomas and his crew escape WCKD’s lab and begin a search for The Right Arm, a military outfit that reportedly helps Immunes find refuge in Safe Haven, far from WCKD’s claws. For most of the film, Thomas and friends bolt from one seedy pocket of humanity (such as a slow-motion rave party churning inside the ruins of a crumbling concrete edifice) to another. WCKD dispatches its security forces to recapture the kids. Cranks, zombie-like individuals who are much more athletic than their pokey Walking Dead kin, keep the teens jumping during their flight. Frequent cries of “We gotta get out of here!” propel the group onward.

To some moviegoers, the film’s early setting could suggest a facility where abortionists harvest the tissue of preborn kids. The scene where Thomas discovers WCKD’s horrible secret plays like a Center for Medical Progress undercover video showing Planned Parenthood officials negotiating the sale of aborted babies’ organs.

But instead of pursuing an angle that could probe controversies like abortion, embryonic stem cell research, or human trafficking, the film settles into a chase across the desert—the “scorch.” A light twist at the end confirms the runners’ intended destination was the third installment of the film franchise.