Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Maze Runner: The Death Cure

When this series premiered four years ago, it was an attempt by the studio to create another popular entry in the young adult-targeted dystopian thriller genre where The Hunger Games had found immense success. Based on the novel by James Dashner, the second film released a year later, but due to an on-set accident involving star Dylan O’Brien, the film was delayed. Now, we’re in early 2018 and the last movie is out and for fans of the series, it should be a satisfying conclusion.

After escaping a giant maze constructed to test their mettle (The Maze Runner), the Gladers fled across the desert to escape WCKD, the villainous corporation attempting to find a cure for a zombie plague ravishing the world, to find safety within a resistance cell (Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials). Now, the surviving members of the tight-knit group of youths have found themselves trying to rescue one of their own from the experiments WCKD is performing on him. As they invade the last untouched city in the world, a walled behemoth of modernism, they unleash events that may ultimately lead to the destruction of and elimination of the human race, unless they can succeed.

The performances are about as unimpressive as they’ve always been and the setting is interesting, but loose plot elements do more to destroy the narrative than the zombies do. There was a lot of promise in the first film and the second did decently in continuing that. Here, things don’t work out quite as originally expected, but they are so well telegraphed that it feels like a natural conclusion. If there weren’t so many plot holes and dropped plot hooks in the film, it might have been a more solid film rather than just solidly entertaining.