The
Scorch Trials—The screen version of James Dashner’s novel The Maze Runner,
released a year ago this month, was about a bunch of teenage boys with no
memory, living in an encampment surrounded on all sides by an enormous maze
that only opened during daylight hours. At the end they got out, to find they
were test subjects of an evil scientist (Patricia Clarkson) in a
post-apocalyptic society.
This
sequel follows the surviving boys, and one girl, as they escape from yet another
sinister complex, only to find themselves in the Scorch, the godforsaken,
sandblasted ruin of an American city. As they try to reach a (possibly
mythical) resistance, they’re beset by zombies (here called “cranks”) and other
menaces, and are pursued all the while by the scientist’s minions.
The
first film was fairly routine masochistic young-adult-fiction melodrama, but
that mysterious maze gave it a certain fascination, at least until everything
was overexplained toward the end. Scorch Trials doesn’t have anything that
tantalizing. It’s just a jumble of sci-fi chase movie tropes. Everything seems
to have been borrowed from other movies—The Omega Man, Logan’s Run, The Road
Warrior, Coma.
Director
Wes Ball, who also helmed The Maze Runner, manages the big action scenes well,
and several fine character actors—Giancarlo Esposito, Aidan Gillen, Barry
Pepper, Lili Taylor and Alan Tudyk, among others—provide some energy. Most of
the kids are attractive but on the uninteresting side, with one big exception:
a young actress named Rosa Salazar joins the gang about midpoint, and gives
Scorch Trials a much-needed dose of soulfulness.
Black
Mass—Jonny Depp plays James “Whitey” Bulger, a notoriously brutal South Boston gang boss of the ‘70s and ‘80s, in Scott
Cooper’s somber, violent true-crime drama. Cooper’s focus is on Bulger’s unholy
alliance with the FBI, apparently the result of the boyhood hero-worship that
one of the agents (Joel Edgerton) had for him.
Depp
is convincing and scary but repellent, and you may find yourself wondering why
you should care about this charmless monster. Not, of course, that he would be
less of a monster if he was more charming, but part of the dynamic of the
gangster picture is the transgressive thrill it offers in making gangsters so
charming we forget they’re monsters while we’re watching.
We
certainly don’t forget it here. But the cast is strong—Benedict Cumberbatch
stands out as Whitey’s respectable brother—and the movie packs plenty of punch.
By
the way, for the tens of readers out there who are no doubt wondering why there
was no Monster-of-the-Week yesterday, the feature is on hiatus. Probably at
least until October gets here.
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