It turns out that even though they are not necessarily plot-destroying, this review has a big spoiler for both the prior movie and this movie. You have been warned.

Bearing in mind that I have not read these books, but, The Death Cure was not the movie I expected it to be. See, The Scorch Trials ended on a classic Empire Strikes Back cliffhanger, with the rebellion in tatters and the coolest guy in the group having been kidnapped. So when this movie started with a classic Firefly train heist to rescue the cool guy, I thought, yep, familiar territory!

But then, it turned out that nope, I was wrong. The entire plot of the movie is the rescue, and the fact that it happens to be the last movie of the trilogy, full of the kinds of events that happen at the ends of trilogies? All of those events seem to be happening mostly around the characters and their goals, instead of the characters actually having goals in the first place. …beyond the rescue, I mean.

So yeah, that’s a lot less spoiler than it could be, but it’s more than I’m comfortable with just throwing out there, is all I’m saying. Anyway: the conclusion was aesthetically and morally satisfying, the characters were as dimensional as they ever were in the prior movies, which is to say not very but also enough so, and there was, as ever, really a lot of running, albeit without enough closing doors of doom this time. If you liked the second movie, this one is perfectly acceptable as well. (If you didn’t, well, it’s certainly not as good as the first one this time, either.)