Escape Room (2019)
Directed by Adam Robitel
Viewed in Theatre
Two things before we get into Escape Room. The first is a PSA, because there’s one scene, pretty late in the movie, where a room begins flashing strobe lights and there was no warning before the movie or on the poster outside the viewing room that indicated there would be any reason that people who have certain kinds of epilepsy might be triggered by things in the movie. That’s not okay. The Incredibles 2 snafu last year is still fresh in my mind, so why did no one at SONY, a multinational corporation, think about this? Very irresponsible. The second is that this is a horror movie released in January, which is typically not a good sign. Now that we’ve front loaded this with bad news, let’s talk about Escape Room!
Escape Room is a thriller about a small group of people gathered together to compete in an Escape Room puzzle with the prize being $10,000 to anyone who can successfully complete it. Quickly realizing that things are not as they seem, the group makes their way through the murderous maze, where the group sometimes comes together to solve the mysteries and sometimes breaks down into squabbling. There’s a bit more to the story than that, but I don’t want to get into spoilers just yet.
Before we get to those puzzle shenanigans, we meet three of the characters who will be partaking in this Escape Room by seeing brief snippets of their lives that explain their characterization in the most blunt way possible. Our three are Zoey, an extremely booksmart introvert, Jason, a high powered cutthroat corporate man, and Ben, an alcoholic loser who radiates a cloud of unlikeability, and I assume that’s why everyone hates him immediately. After receiving a mysterious invitation to the game, our three heroes arrive, meeting three other heroes who did not receive any of the characterization that our previously mentioned group did. That could mean one of two things: either our first three heroes are the important ones and these new ones are just filler, or the new ones are the real heroes and we just learned more about them to make their deaths more poetic. Let’s play a game, you place your bets now and I’ll reveal their fate at the end of the review when I talk about spoilers!
Before I get into the meat of Escape Room I will mention some of the things I enjoyed about the movie. The pace was pretty brisk, moving along at a steady clip for the most part, before only getting slightly wonky at the end. Also most of the rooms themselves were nicely designed with good effects work on the traps and tricks, especially considering the smaller budget that this movie had. And the main plot is good, I have no issue with the idea of a group of people trapped in a dangerous location trying to figure out how to get out of that location, with a ticking clock element. That’s a good story! But therein lies the first problem.
That problem being that that movie already exists. It is called Cube. Cube is a movie about a group of people trapped in a mysterious location trying to escape while dealing with growing interpersonal tensions. Full disclosure here, I love Cube and through most of the runtime of Escape Room all I could think about was how Cube had tackled similar issues of plot, puzzle progression, character dynamics, and world building, while doing all of those things better in every conceivable way. Movies are, of course, allowed to have similar premises, but this is a really unique concept that feels more than a little like a ripoff. Cube is a great movie and I strongly recommend it, but I will try to be fair and not compare Escape Room to Cube for the rest of this review.
If I didn’t make it clear earlier, I have no love for any of these characters. They are oversimplified, one-dimensional folk who exist for the sole purpose of providing easy conflict that could fill the sequences between when the puzzles are solved. It doesn’t help that the cast is just okay, they aren’t bad, but no one could make the limp dialogue they’re given compelling. They’re all characters we’ve seen before and occasionally veer off into unfortunate stereotypes, like with Danny, the nerdy excitable Indian gamer guy, which seems a bit odd. Maybe he wouldn’t bother me so much if he ever had any development.
Speaking of the puzzles, they have a few issues. Sometimes they’re clever, but usually they’re way too simple, in at least one or two cases I figured out the answers before genius Zoey, and I’m terrible at Escape Room style stuff. Example, they find a combination lock that needs a seven letter word. The clue they find is, “You’ll go down in history.” Take a moment. Think about that. Because that is a puzzle that NO ONE, including the genius, is able to solve, except by the person for whom this puzzle brings up traumatic memories for. Some of the puzzles are like that though, designed solely to mysteriously poke the traumatic memories of one of the group. They eventually explain why this happens, but it’s a really really dumb explanation.
Okay so I talked about the characters and the plot and that I find things a bit lacking so I guess now is time to get into
SPOILER TERRITORY
The reveal is that the Escape Room is just a thing that megarich assholes setup as a sporting/betting event. It’s just a convenient way of handwaving how the creators of the puzzle are able to know details like the type/color of a jacket that features in a character’s backstory, the song playing on the radio in another’s, and I honestly would have preferred the twist be that it was a haunted escape room or something. It would have made more sense. I know they were going for a downer ‘worldwide conspiracy that you can’t possibly fight’ reasoning, but here that just feels like a justification to excuse lazy writing.
SPOILERS END HERE
Even though I came down on it pretty hard in some places, like characters, dialogue, and some of the puzzles, I didn’t hate this movie. I give some credit for trying to put out an ‘original’ movie, but there’s really nothing here I can recommend. The only people who MIGHT get something out of this would be people who just like seeing horror movies in theatre and, given the effects-driven nature of some of the film, this may be better to watch out than at home. But when you get down to it there just isn’t anything interesting in the movie, and it’s from SONY, so it’s not like you’re hurting an indie production company by not seeing it. Instead of seeing Escape Room I would recommend that you watch Cube instead, for a fraction of the cost of a trip to the theatre.
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