The Scorch Trials is the sequel to last year’s The Maze Runner. Maze Runner was an okish movie buoyed slightly by an interesting, mysterious premise and an inventive creature design and environment. The Scorch Trials isn’t that movie. Instead, its set in a generic post-apocalyptic wasteland free of originality and instead of a weird mechanical-biological maze monster, we get generic fast-running zombies. Yes, this series has turned into a zombie movie, which was a bit of a surprise to me.

The movie picks up right after the previous movie so hopefully you remember that flick since this one has no interest in getting you up to speed. And then it proceeds to offer us a very generic post-apocalypse and very few original ideas at all. Of course we don’t trust Aidan Gillen and his group of thugs (who rescued our heroes from the first movie) – he’s Littlefinger from Game of Thrones… of course he’s up to no good. We don’t get much in the way of surprises OR answers to what the heck is going on… I guess they are leaving that for the third movie (since this one ends on the most Empire Strikes Back cliff-hanger ever – only with the added benefit of not caring about who was captured because he (or she) had very few lines in this movie).

Which says something about the script for this 2 hour movie. There’s not enough story to justify the run-time and there’s a distressingly large number of scenes they could have just cut out completely. The main character has no discernible traits that make him a hero except, perhaps, for his backstory which sounds more interesting that the story on screen. The villains twirl their mustaches and work for an organization (seriously) called Wicked… of WCKD which stands for (get this) World Crisis Killzone Division. Killzone Division? What does that even mean? No worries – this movie won’t explain it. Moving on.

I mentioned zombies earlier and yes, there are infected people who run around as fast zombies in the way fast zombies run around in movies (thanks 28 Days Later). And then, half-way through the movie, they change from people in makeup to CG zombies for reasons unknown. Except, perhaps, because someone saw The Last of US (the PS3/4 video game) and wanted those zombies instead… and the set piece where they climb through a building that’s knocked into another building (though, to be fair, this was one of the only decent action set pieces in the movie… though that’s partly because they whole-sale ripped off the Julianne-Moore-Falls-and-Lands-on-Glass sequences from The Lost World: Jurassic Park).

All in all, I was bored bigtime with this movie. The first movie had some invention to it which is not this movie in the least. This was very much a wheel-spinning set-up for part 3 and barely needs to exist because its barely a story.

Score: 59