Recycled Garbage

Rating: 4/10 (21 September 2014)

Maze Runner borrows all its beats from other films. There's nothing original here. This is an obvious ploy to take us for a ride and this recycled crap is what is wrong with Hollywood.
This movie is weak in all areas that make a movie classic, but strong in all areas that churn box office tickets; this is all visual.
We were rooting for these characters to die, and hoping for each turn that this would turn into an amazing slasher flick like Cabin in the Woods... but we were disappointed.
Harry Potter meets Hunger Games meets The Lord of the Rings meets every other film made with teenagers. They had a Piggy character from the Lord of the Flies novel, but he wasn't picked on. The main character is a cardboard version of Taylor Lautner's Jacob, and the female lead isn't really even in the movie. She does absolutely nothing except give one of the boys a chance to say, "girls are weird". I realized after the movie that the girl in this movie is Kaya Scodelario or Effy from Skins. Kaya can act -- she is insanely good -- and they barely gave her any lines or anything to work with. We don't know who this character is at all by the end. She might as well stayed in the basement.
Three years these young men are stuck together. There is no homosexuality, no masturbation or jokes about masturbation (come on man these are teens -- there would be SOMETHING), no attacks on the first girl to show up in a few years. Nobody even hits on her. Nothing at all. We are simply expected to throw human nature out the window.
The set for this shitty film is a Hollywood Sandbox surrounded by a death trap. Snoooooze. The death trap is not particularly interesting. The big baddies that patrol the deathtrap never once decide to scale the walls... because they are machines programmed to serve a purpose. What purpose? We do not know because Hollywood prefers not to reveal that. They haven't decided yet. There is no background, no huge reveal as to why these teens are in the situation they were in, and we are left in the dark at the end of the film.
But that's not even the biggest issue here. Nobody who made this film really thought very hard about the serious flaws. None of the boys scale the walls to map the maze from the middle? From up there you can see the whole maze.
This is just unintelligent mediocrity with some pacing and action but it's not even that good unless you try to watch it as a comedy, which is what we did.
You leave wondering what this was even about. Then you realize it was about making money for Hollywood via shitty CGI.