Running on Empty: MAZE RUNNER: THE SCORCH TRIALS

The kids stuck in a maze in last year’s young adult franchise starter The Maze Runner are out of the labyrinth and in a post-apocalyptic confusion in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. There’s not a single maze to be found, but there’s still plenty of running as a group of boys and one girl find themselves in a mysterious compound where a commander (Aidan Gillen) tells them to be patient and he’ll take them to a better place. Turns out he’s lying, because of course he is. So off the kids run into a desert wasteland stretched between ruined cities. The world has ended, and they have no idea what to do, so why not keep running from the guys with guns who want to recapture them and feed their blood into blue vats pumping out potential vaccines for a zombie virus. (That doesn’t seem too bad, considering.) It really is that simple, but I don’t know why the whole thing has to be knotted up like no one has a clue, or why it takes our heroes so long to figure out their next move.

The least interesting of this cycle of teen adventure series – behind The Hunger Games, and Twilight, and even the thin derivative Divergent – the Maze Runners are without personality. It’s a dystopian sci-fi zombie conspiracy mystery with a screenplay (again by T.S. Nowlin) that works exactly like a jumble of tropes and half-formed carbon copies of better ideas used more effectively elsewhere. The characters are undifferentiated. There’s the lead (Dylan O’Brien), his buddies (Ki Hong Lee, Dexter Darden, Thomas Brodie-Sangster), and a girl (Kaya Scodelario), running through the desert called The Scorch, trying to survive. But between this movie and the last, we’ve spent nearly four hours with this group and I still couldn’t begin to tell you what their goals, hopes, dreams, and proclivities are.

They’re just the runway-ready grubby survivors, lost in scorching heat and stuck in a nightmare of zombie imagery. We know they’re the heroes because they’re young and this is YA. The bad guys are of course the grown-ups with the evil organization (the World in Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department – or Wicked, for real). It’s never entirely clear why the bad are so bad and the good are worth caring about, but never mind. Grown-ups just don’t understand. The escaped teens have nowhere to turn, and no interior lives to draw upon. Now, I could understand their spotty backstories, since their memories were wiped. But where’s the personality? They are thoroughly bland and lifeless despite the young actors’ best efforts to imbue their line readings with meaning, strain, and stress. When they run, they throw their whole bodies into it, swinging their arms side to side and twisting their torsos. It’s like they’re trying to run right off the screen and out of the theater. I knew the feeling.

As I sat through the movie’s opening stretches, I found myself wondering if the whole thing could be improved by the presence of some welcome older character actors who could at least elevate the dull, empty proceedings with their gravitas and charm. Soon enough, it started regularly introducing tiny nothing parts for the likes of Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Tudyk, Lili Taylor, and Barry Pepper. But even they can’t save scenes that require them to do nothing more than gravely intone exposition or wait for effects work to explode around them. Lifeless dreck, there’s not one moment lively or interesting in and of itself. The closest it gets are a sequence set in an abandoned zombie-infested shopping mall and, later, a woman (Rose Salazar) stuck on a rapidly cracking pane of glass over a deadly vertiginous height. In other words, even at its best it’s weakly lifted from better movies (Dawn of the Dead and The Lost World, respectively) without any creative twist or winking homage.

It’s just borrowed ingenuity heaped on a derivative structure. On a technical level it’s competently made, with convincing effects, sturdy photography, and some brisk action cutting. A moment involving a safe house rigged to self-destruct has a clever beat or two, and a moment of climactic betrayal-induced dread works well enough. But crushing boredom takes up most of its 131 long minutes as I quickly lost interest. I suspect director Wes Ball, helming the sequel to his directorial debut, could do good decent work given a better screenplay. Maybe a corporate superhero universe will call. But here a talented cast and crew have far too little to work with. It’s slick, professional, and completely uninteresting.

New Old Haunts: THE CONJURING

I was dubious when I saw too-promotable-to-be-true reports that The Conjuring was rated R for being too scary for PG-13, but actually seeing the film has me thinking otherwise. With barely a drop of blood, the movie had me more frightened than any horror film of the last year or two. It is an expertly calibrated haunted house experience complete with all the strange noises, fleeting movements, and odd apparitions you’d expect. But even though it draws upon all the expected tropes of the haunted house movie, it scares early and often. It’s a tingling, absorbing horror film full of dread and wittily staged and framed scares. What makes it so compelling and convincing is not just that it’s an impeccably timed series of jumps and jolts, but that it’s a fully inhabited film with superbly real production design, excellent natural performances, and a relaxed and patient approach to building up to its best moments of panic and fright. Director James Wan has been making horror films for nearly a decade now, from the nasty, torturous Saw to the sleek freak out of Insidious. With this new production, he’s made his best film yet.

It’s a film with a clear appreciation for its genre’s history (the 1970’s setting allows for appealing echoes of that decades horror landmarks) and a dedication to fulfilling tropes in surprising and unrelentingly creepy ways. As it must, it starts with a nice normal family moving into a big old house in the country. The mother (Lili Taylor) and father (Ron Livingston) wearily unpack boxes while their five daughters (Shanley Caswell, Hayley McFarland, Joey King, Mackenzie Foy, and Kyla Deaver) run around exploring. It’s not too long before the family starts to feel something is not quite right with their new surroundings. Their dog dies. One girl starts sleepwalking. Each morning, the family wakes to find every clock in the house has stopped at exactly 3:07 am. Footsteps, whispers, and claps are heard in empty areas of the house. Some events can be explained away, but as they pile up, coincidence gives way to a sense of oppressive invisible spookiness.

This is all familiar haunted house stuff, but Wan manages to create a sense of novelty. Sure, we, the horror audience, have seen this type of thing before. But this is the first time it’s happening to this family. Because the acting is so unaffected and comfortable, because the family dynamics feel so real, the growing unease is all the more shivery. The surprise of creaking floorboards and drafty door swings escalates to the insinuating presence of something not quite right and it feels fresh once more. A stroke of genius in the film’s construction is to introduce and intercut the story of a pair of paranormal investigators for whom this is not fresh. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga play Ed and Lorraine Warren, a married couple that specializes in investigating reported hauntings. While happenings at the house in the country grow increasingly distressing, we occasionally cut to the Warrens giving lectures, conducting interviews, and inspecting properties. They’re professionals. By the time they show up at the house at the center of the film and express concern, we know that means trouble. It amplifies the dread.

The script by Chad and Carey Hayes builds and escalates with a nicely varied assortment of dangers and scares. (I especially appreciated the creepy and clever solution to the eternal haunted house question “Why don’t they just leave?”) This is a horror film that’s in confident command of its mood, able to sustain the absorbing hushed creepiness even as the events on screen are teasingly normal. Scenes of familial warmth and professional confidence may scare the darkness away, but the dread lingers. The production design is impressive, a homey lived-in 1970s of complete and convincing period detail that emphasizes the “Based on a true story” trappings. Publicity would undoubtedly emphasize “true story,” but the key word is always “based.” Also sold this way was the 1979 film The Amityville Horror, the quintessential film of this subgenre, despite its vaguely dull pulpy junkiness. Its “true story” also involved an investigation by the real-world Warrens.  There’s a connection here that’s nicely felt, a continuity with horror past not just with the Warrens and the period setting, but in The Conjuring’s smooth steady long takes, the period design, and the oblique nods to hauntings past. Classically, handsomely designed, the film’s a throwback without feeling old-fashioned.

Its most welcome throwback aspect is in the way it is a bit more of a character piece than you might expect. It has time for small moments – a shy smile the oldest daughter shares with a young research assistant of the Warrens, a scene in which the family bonds with the investigators over a breakfast of pancakes. Small details turn scary, too, like a friendly hide-and-seek game involving claps and blindfolds that becomes predictably, but oh-so-effectively, chilling when a ghost gets involved. Wan may have set out to make something like the ultimate haunted house movie, filled with possessions, poltergeists, curses, and exorcisms, but like all good horror movies, The Conjuring scares not through genre prowess alone, but through skillful filmmaking on every level. It’s a film that builds up a big creaky house, populates it with people to care about, and grooves on a frightening atmosphere of anticipation punctuated by scares that work allusively, metaphorically, and viscerally. Its scares may make you jump, but it never feels cheap or exploitative. It is unrelentingly entertaining and terrifically effective.