As if the name didn’t give it away, Maze Runner: Death Cure is the final instalment of the Maze Runner franchise – a dystopian young-adult actioner, featuring teenage lads and ladies, monsters and wicked corporations (in this case, the evil company is actually called WCKD).

Running at a 142 minutes, the movie is a tad too long, but being a culmination – and obviously that means killing some important cast members – things do not drag that much. A lot of fireballs, a train robbery sequence, and a futuristic city’s destruction play side-by-side to Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) and co.’s constant escape and retaliation from the evil doers, who as it turns out, became bad with the best of intentions.

In a nutshell, the plot is about finding a cure for the plague that inflicts most of mankind – and no points for guessing – the cure, ultimately resides in Thomas’s blood.

The villains’ motive to help humanity – and most of the plot adapted from James Dashner’s novel – is hogwash. Death Cure is singlehandedly saved by the franchise’s director Wes Ball, who has the skill set to make the insipid look grand (the movie is budgeted at $61 million, but looks like $100 million). The cinematography by Gyula Pados is clean, and the visual effects seamless.

O’Brien and his co-stars Kaya Scodelario, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Dexter Darden, Ki Hong Lee, Rosa Salazar, and (spoiler alert) the returning Will Poulter, know their roles like the back of their hand, despite most of their acting being limited to wide-eyed expressions and running away from bullets. Patricia Clarkson, Barry Pepper, Giancarlo Esposito, Walter Goggins (appearing as a nose-less character) and Aiden Gillen round off the adult cast with no backstories and bare-minimum relevance and dialogues (Gillen, though, has the most to do as the main villain in Death Cure).

Still, the movie functions well enough, despite its pedestrian ambitions. Death Cure – and especially director Ball – handle the kids-in-totalitarian-dystopia franchise with an unprecedented level of clarity and quality, and a big helping of adrenaline.