A group of people was invited into a seemingly harmless game in which they had to surpass a series of labyrinthine structured rooms in exchange of money.
There's nothing more visually arousing about a suspense film revolving a bunch of randomly picked individuals, ranging from the diffident to the egotistical ones, working together as a group in order to outwit and outplay a man-made self-established game with a life and death gamble
, besting each other towards the end for that coveted but limited chance of survival. While it's not particularly an original potboiler, and quite frankly a bit of a tired modern-age thriller trope in the last decades or so, there are still a lot of rooms to explore with regards to tension building, psychological trauma and overall creativity that highlights the director and the writer's visions towards the film.
In Escape Room, six strangers were lured into playing a harmless escape-a-room type game in exchange of a $10,000 reward. The catch however is that only one can win and the ones that don't will never see the light of day. With this premise alone, one can quite catch the glimpse of how the film would probably operate, with lots of comparisons in mind such as Cube, Cabin in the Woods, and the Saw franchise to name a few. While obviously familiar, Bragi F. Schut and Maria Melnik's screenplay had a few niche to separate itself apart from the above-mentioned films.
For one, the set designs and clever puzzle mechanics for the first part of the film was intriguing and makes the audience think with the characters as they find a logical solution to it. Deborah Ann Wall's performance as Amanda is a standout which reminded me of how good she was in Netflix's Daredevil as Karen Page. Wall's presence on screen is much stronger than that of Taylor Russel's Zoey, which is apparently the main lead and while she started strong, she ended up being just another bland pawn lost in the mix of things as the story goes.
As for the other characters unfortunately, I thought the film struggled to establish a strong footing with them and became flat and uninteresting on the process, despite the fact that they even gave them individual flashbacks as a way of making us feel for them and make their demise mean something.
The movie continues to worsen as we approach the second half. Nothing in those sequences makes sense and it's as if the writers rushed it, reaped out the bad pages from their movie inspirations and mixed them up to create something that was horrible for all the wrong reasons. I thought the final sequence was a big cop-out moment for the writers just for the sake of being eerie and mysterious without providing any logical explanation to how things ended up like that. It was ridiculously confusing but not in a titillatingly meaningful way.
The film was also rated R-13, thus responsible for the all the bloodless killings that the film showed and while it's not always necessary to incorporate gore into these types of film, I thought it would've help it to be at least satisfyingly fun and entertaining to watch. The movie also hinted a possible sequel at the ending scene but with how things went, I don't think they have stirred enough interest for the audience to be excited about what's to come.
Let's Be Reel
Ironically, Escape Room was trapped in its own mediocrity. It had its fun moments but was outweighed by all the cliché and nonsensical shtick that added nothing but fluff and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. For what it's worth, at least its familiarity with Saw and the like will gain it at least an amount of intrigue but to be honest, there's better films to watch out there especially if you're looking for horror-thriller experience.
4/10
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