His buddies from the Glade don’t fare much better in the characterization department. He doesn’t develop much of a personality along the way, though, even though we receive clues from his past that he has always been The Chosen One. He’s the requisite rebel in this YA series, cut from the same cloth as Katniss in “ The Hunger Games” and Tris in “ Divergent” he’s the one who dares to shake up the status quo, challenge a cold, monolithic government known by the not-so-subtle acronym WCKD (i.e. The hero who emerged at the center of part one, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), remains the quietly courageous leader in part two.
These adventures might be more intriguing if the characters involved in them had even a smidgen of depth. They walk across the desert by day, trying to survive the heat, then run across it by night, trying to escape lightning strikes. They’re skulking about an abandoned mall by flashlight, then slinking through a sewer system by flashlight. They’re under the protection of one untrustworthy adult, then another. The characters are in one post-apocalyptic bunker, then they’re in another. Nowlin (who co-wrote the first film in the franchise) has an episodic structure that ultimately makes it feel repetitive. But while his characters are constantly on the run, it feels like they’re never really going anywhere. Returning director Wes Ball covers a lot more ground this time, literally and figuratively, in adapting the second novel in author James Dashner’s “Maze Runner” series.
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