Escape Room

Escape Room

Starring Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Tyler Labine

Directed by Adam Robitel

The Story:
Six strangers - Zoey (Taylor Russell), Ben (Logan Miller), Amanda (Deborah Ann Woll), Mike (Tyler Labine), Jason (Jay Ellis) and Danny (Nik Dodani) - are invited to a mysterious escape room experience, where those who survive will be given $10,000.  Thinking its just a game at first, the participants don't take the game seriously, but when they learn it's a matter of life and death, things become all too real, and they soon realize they weren't selected by accident - they have a dark secret in common that could be the biggest clue to getting out of the game alive.

The Synopsis:
The torture porn subgenre of horror was all the rage about a decade ago, but humorously enough, people have gotten tired of seeing other people gutted, decapitated, and sliced open repeatedly...who would've thought?  With once-appealing concept movies like "Saw" and "Hostel" becoming a thing of the past, 2019 is the perfect year to bring it back with yet another torture porn film, with a twist: it's rated PG-13!  So now we don't even get the torture part, as any violence is completely neutered and unmemorable, surrounded by surprisingly terrible CGI in otherwise surprisingly decent set designs.  That, mixed with poor characters and even poorer performances, will undoubtedly leave "Escape Room" as one of those films people will forget even existed a month from now.

The latest current movement for entertainment is Escape Rooms, where a group of people are locked in a room and given an hour to escape, and they're rather popular in America.  Some rooms have neat themes - such as vampires, zombies, or escaping from a prison - and there's clues abounding, and allows people to work together for a common purpose.  They're extremely fun and thoughtful, and of course it was only a matter of time before this theme found its way to the big screen (as it is, there's already been a few direct-to-DVD "Escape Room" films, and I still don't know how this one got the funding to play with the big boys).  The positive thing I can say about this film is that the set designs are extremely lavish, distinctive, but ultimately it's like seeing the most beautiful, extravagant house and when you go inside, find it completely devoid of anything.

That void here comes from the characters, who aren't given a lot to work with to begin with, and only get worse as the film continues.  Six strangers are forced to work together to survive, but if I was one of those players, I would pretty much kill most of them myself due to their annoyance factors.  Each character, obviously, has their own unique tick - Zoey is a savant, Ben is a drunk, Amanda is a war vet suffering from PTSD, Mike is the wannabe hip cool dad, Jason is the rich snob who looks out only for himself, and Danny is the nerd who's played almost a hundred escape rooms in his life.  There's not much more depth to their characters, and it seems that 95% of their dialogue was completely improvised and consisted of different ways of saying, "we have to get out of here," "look for clues," "don't do that," and the like.  In fact, it'd be fun to play a drinking game with this movie where you take a drink every time someone says one of the aforementioned phrases - you'll be hammered before they even get out of the first room.

The concept of the film overall is one we've seen in several films before, with a shady super-powerful corporation being bored with the world and deciding to bet against the lives of poor citizens as to who will make it out alive, and inherently becomes the most implausible aspect of the film.  How a corporation can make such elaborate, sophisticated, and downright nutty ways to kill people without ever being caught - either by the cops wondering why a bunch of people are working at an abandoned building, or one of the multitude of workers actually going to the cops, or the like - is beyond me.

Even though the film tries to be too smart for its own good, it ultimately fails to deliver any shocks or excitement, especially if you've seen the trailer (as it gives away pretty much every death), or even the opening scene of the film itself where we see the lone survivor already trying to find their way out of the final room, thus giving away the fact that all the others will eventually die.  They still try to spice things up, but ultimately this film is about as hard to decipher as putting together a four-piece puzzle.

The Summary:
Despite offering unique set designs, the only thing you'll be doing while watching "Escape Room" is trying to find the escape out of the room you're in while watching it.

The Score: D+