I’ve done a couple escape rooms in my time. Two to be precise. Won both, but through no real effort of my own. See, I have a couple friends who do escape rooms all the time, and they’ve invited me along as part of their group on occasion, and since they do them all the time and are so darn good at it, I mostly just stayed out of the experienced players’ way and got the thrill of victory regardless. It’s a fun way to spend part of an hour or so, but I’m not so sure I am all that good at puzzles, so maybe not my thing.
That has little to do with the 2019 horror film Escape Room, but it has a quickly produced sequel coming out this week, so I figured it was worth a quick pay-per-view rental.
After a quick scene showing a desperate young man trying not to get crushed to death in a room where the walls are literally closing in on him, we cut back to before all this started and a group of people are getting invited to try their wits at an escape room. All of the players are strangers with one thing in common that none of them really know about right away. There’s brilliant and withdrawn college student Zoey (Taylor Russell), supermarket clerk (and guy from the opening scene) Ben (Logan Miller), hypercompetitive stockbroker Jason (Jay Ellis), Iraq war vet with PTSD Amanda (Deborah Ann Woll), laid back trucker Mike (Tyler Labine), and game enthusiast Danny (Nik Dodani). As the six chat about what to expect, Ben gets up to step out of the waiting room for a quick smoke when the door handle snaps off. It isn’t long before the group realizes the waiting room is the first of multiple rooms they will need to escape from, and furthermore, these rooms are dangerous and outright deadly. Not all of them are getting out of this one alive…
That’s the basic premise, and given the movie is PG-13, not a particularly gruesome one either. Anyone hoping to see some grisly deaths will be disappointed. Like a number of PG-13 action and horror movies, deaths are often done with little if any blood and often off-camera. I don’t even know that what happens here is all that scary. The tension built into various trap scenes does often work, but I don’t know that I would call it frightening. Then again, thanks to trailers for the sequel, I had a good idea who was surviving this one anyway.
As it is, the characters aren’t necessarily all that deep either. Russell’s Zoey has something approaching a character arc, but of the players, the only one with a distinctive personality that’s built into the script seems to be Ellis’s Jason, mostly because he’s the one member of the group who perhaps deserves to die. Everyone else is more or less a cypher of sorts. It helps to have an actor like Labine with his easygoing charm on screen, with one moment that might have been an inadvertent reference to his movie Tucker and Dale vs Evil, but that’s about it there. The others are not given much to work with, and while I would say any of the actors gave a bad performance (none did, really), there isn’t a lot for them to do but take turns dying until the last ones are standing to maybe find out what the heck is going on.
That said, if there’s anything to get into, the puzzles are rather elaborate and well-done. That may be the point of the movie as it goes from one detailed set piece to another, showing the characters struggling to find a way out and being whittled down one by one. Beyond the puzzles and escapes, there isn’t a lot there, setting the movie up as like Saw without the gore, James Wan’s style, or Jigsaw’s moral judgement of his victims. Escape Room is not quite the movie it advertised itself to be, and I don’t expect the sequel to be either, but in the meantime, it was at least a decent way to spend 100 or so minutes if not a particularly mind-blowing one.
Grade: C
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