A One Mann’s Movies review of “Escape Room” (2019).
Bob the Movie Man’s Rating:
Certification:
UK: 15; US: PG-13.
I really wanted to like this flick. I’ve found that smaller films with a clever premise tend to rank highly in my list of favourite films of the year. Think “Nerve” and “Midnight Special” from 2016; “Colossal” from 2017; or “Searching” from last year.
Here, the premise was promising: an adventure-cum-horror set around the party trend for “escape rooms”. This is not novel: there was a very similar “Escape Room” film from 2017 (which seemed to disappear without trace) and a TV Movie (“No Escape Room”) from last year that took a more supernatural angle.
The delivery though leaves much to be desired. It’s a bad sign when a third-reel action sequence opens the film in “flash-forward” to keep the punters in their seats.
The Plot.
Six strangers are all sent an invitation in the form of a puzzle box. When they solve the puzzle they find themselves invited to a mystery location lured by the opportunity to win a share of $100,000. All they have to do is escape from the establishment, solving – as in any escape room – the cryptic puzzles presented to them. But pretty quickly they find that the game is a lot more arduous, and a lot more deadly, than any of them were expecting.
A Promising Start.
We are given subliminal introductions to the characters, with the focus on cute college genius Zoey (Taylor Russell) and deadbeat loser Logan (Ben Miller) giving an early steer as to who the filmmakers wants you to be rooting for later. Elsewhere there’s an ice-trucker (Tyler Labine); a military vet (Deborah Ann Woll); a step-on-anyone business brat (Jay Ellis) and an escape-room specialist (the script reads “geek” here) played by Nik Dodani.
Then the film gets more interesting as the mismatched group face their first challenge room, unaware that the game has even started. Even when the game heats up spectacularly, they are still unaware of the level of stakes on the table, assuming the action to all be elaborate effects designed to set their adrenaline racing, but nothing more. (By the way, even at this point they’re not all that bright, ignoring a rather obvious way of producing more liquid into the given receptacles).
A progressive cooling off.
From this point onwards the film starts to become less interesting, with the “episodes” becoming rather tiresome repetitions: variations on the “characters-in-peril” familiar from so many other slasher movies.
Not that I’m remotely into “Saw”-style gore, but if the film had been slightly more inventive in its ‘dispatches’ (in the vein of the “Final Destination” films) it would have been more entertaining. But everything is sanitised to death, presumably to try to get a young-teen friendly certificate (it even seems to have failed at this: the BBFC gave it a ’15’ certificate in the UK, which to me seems rather harsh).
The only time things get interesting is with a genuinely nail-biting scene in a bizarre upside-down bar (“Oh no! The world is turning turtle”).
However, after this we proceed down an increasingly greasy slope to a wholly predictable finale.
Actors out of their depth.
The fact that you’ve probably never heard of any of the cast before will give you a sense of what the delivery is like in most quarters. It’s telling that the BIG REVEAL of the ‘star’ playing “The Gamesmaster” turns out to be Yorick van Wageningen. (He was memorably treated to a baseball bat in the original “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, but apart from that….).
Of the young cast it is only really Taylor Russell that stands out as “one to watch” for the future.
Oh no, surely not worth a sequel?
The final nail in the coffin for me was a massively contrived sequence as a set-up for a presumed sequel. This would to me have smacked of wild optimism on the part of the producers, but bizarrely the film seems to have (at the time of writing) made over $60 million at the box office on a budget of just $9 million. So perhaps their set-up showed more foresight than I would have predicted!
It’s a movie that has its moments, but I would personally wait for a (VERY) rainy afternoon and catch it on streaming.
Trailer:
The trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dSKUoV0SNI .
