Instead, what we get is essentially an old-school jailbreak movie, and director Ball wastes zero time flexing his action chops, kicking off the film with a solidly executed train robbery sequence. But it’s here that “Death Cure” makes its most surprising choice: it barely concerns itself with the particulars of the whole conspiracy at all. This underlying concept, as revealed at the end of the first film and elaborated upon endlessly in the second, is all exceedingly daft – and the more the series’ mythology expands, the daffier it tends to get. The poor kids imprisoned in the maze (they call themselves “Gladers”) are immune to the Flare virus’ effects, and WCKD’s head pair of sinister scientists (Aidan Gillen, Patricia Clarkson) subject them to various nefarious procedures to try to extract a cure from their blood. They did this as part of a needlessly complicated strategy to fight a massive global pandemic known as “The Flare,” which turns the infected into mindless zombie-like creatures called cranks. Perhaps mindful that the film is unlikely to attract many newcomers at this point, “Death Cure” devotes almost no time to catching audiences up on the events of 2014’s “The Maze Runner” and 2015’s “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials.” For those with short memories, our hero Thomas (O’Brien) is still hard at work fighting an evil, quasi-governmental agency known as WCKD, which imprisoned him and a slew of comparably good-looking youngsters in a monster-filled labyrinth called “The Glade” in the first film, then pursued them across a harsh desert wasteland in the second. It may be too late to turn the cultural tide on the genre, but it comes as a relief to see at least one series manage to stick the landing.

Downplaying some of the property’s sillier elements when not jettisoning them entirely, and streamlining the narrative into a rousing and at times even emotional action film, “Death Cure” is the most successful entry in the franchise by far. Somewhat surprisingly, however, “Maze Runner’s” core team – including original series director Wes Ball – have rallied to give this once middling saga a proper sending-off. Ever since Jennifer Lawrence called time on Katniss, “Divergent” has fizzled out rather ignominiously “Ender’s Game” and “The 5th Wave” proved to be nonstarters and after a delayed production that saw series lead Dylan O’Brien injured in an on-set accident, “ Maze Runner: The Death Cure,” the third and final entry in Fox’s adaptations of James Dashner’s books, finally arrives this month with relatively little fanfare. After “The Hunger Games” became a genuine phenomenon, studios went on a spending spree, scouring increasingly indistinguishable tales of chosen ones and oppressive government regimes for potential franchises, with decidedly mixed results.

The past few years have been a rather dystopian era for dystopian YA film adaptations.

The death cure setting