THE MAZE RUNNER

Two out of 5 stars

M, 113 minutes, opens Thursday

Director: Wes Ball
Stars: Dylan O'Brien, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Kaya Scodelario, Patricia Clarkson, Will Poulter

Here we are again in Dystopia - furnished this time round with reminders of Lord of the Flies.

A group of teenage boys  is stranded in a place known only as the Glade. The boys  have no memory of how they got there and no way out. The Glade is hemmed in by the towering walls of an impenetrable maze inhabited by animatronic monsters out for their blood. Welcome back to the future as conceived by Hollywood in its frantic assault on the fantasy market for young adults.

The Maze Runner was adapted from the first novel in a trilogy by American writer James Dashner, another great publishing success. Fox has acquired the rights to the books and the script for this initial effort is by Noah Oppenheim, who's also working on the Divergent series, which depicts a future-world of similar grimness. Its social fabric, however, offers a bit more to muse on than anything on show here. But it's early days yet. If the box-office returns for The Maze Runner come up to expectations, its sequel, which is already in planning, should reveal more about the politics of its particular corner of Dystopia, as well as altering the atmosphere.

Here we have a story about a fight to get out of prison. The next movie promises to set our heroes down in a wasteland so lethal they're desperate to get back inside. In other words, it'll be flipping the switch from claustrophobia to agoraphobia.

But back to the Glade, where Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) wakes up one morning after being transported there by a mysterious elevator which comes up from a hole in the ground. He knows little of his past except for his name and none of his fellow residents, who call themselves Gladers, can help him because they arrived in a similar state. Newt (Game of Thrones's Thomas Brodie-Sangster) is friendly. Gally, played by pugnacious-looking British actor Will Poulter, is not.

But the film's psychological aspects are quickly overshadowed by its setting.  Director Wes Brooks has had a long and productive career in design and visual effects and his talents in that department are thoroughly exploited here. The maze itself is an intricate arrangement of concrete blocks which can re-configure themselves without warning. Heavy sliding doors slam shut, which means those who venture inside the maze are always in danger of either being crushed or cast into a compromising position with the giant animatronic bugs which have colonised its innards.

These are called Grievers and the script wastes no time in getting Thomas into his first skirmish with them. He dashes into the maze in an attempt to save one of the group's "runners" - the boys charged with exploring it in the hope of finding an escape route - and he's soon in a lot of trouble.

It's an inventive premise but once the plot's workings are laid out, it proves to be very short on revelatory twists. You don't have to be Philip K. Dick to guess that the Gladers are the victims of some kind of diabolical behaviourist experiment and that they're going to be released sooner or later into an even more hazardous outside world.

While we wait for that to happen, the race to unravel the maze's mysteries becomes so frenetic and so repetitive that speed soon upstages suspense. Except for Blake Cooper's Chuck, who bears a superficial resemblance to Lord of the Flies' Piggy, and Poulter, whose chronically bad-tempered Gally steals the show, the film's young leads get no chance to be anything but bland. And because the plot is completely dominated by the action sequences, little time is spent on its refinements. The ending is so hastily played out that it's risible, and  there's such a scramble to set up the sequel that you emerge feeling as if  you've just spent half an hour in a washing machine set on spin cycle.

The fantasy market may be voracious but its fans are also highly knowledgeable and demanding. And the sophistication of The Hunger Games and its sequels  is setting a benchmark that none of the series' rivals  has yet managed to match. This one doesn't change anything.