Mark Reviews Movies: ESCAPE ROOM (2019)

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | January 3, 2019

Setting a horror movie within the confines of a series of deadly escape rooms seems like a great idea. For those who haven't caught on to the craze yet, an escape room puts forth a series of puzzles and riddles before a group of players, who have to find clues in order to solve challenges that eventually give the players the key to exiting the space. Using this phenomenon of friendly outings and corporate team-building exercises alike as the backdrop/gimmick of a horror movie at least would seem to guarantee one thing: the quick weeding out of the dopier of the characters.

Alas, the dopiest thing about Escape Room is the movie itself. It features six fatal rooms and six characters. By using basic math, you can pretty much garner the core idea of how the movie operates, as well as how predictably conventional its aims are.

On average, one character dies in each of the spaces, and it has to be an average here, since the first room serves to set up the very real threat—hence, having no casualties—and the final room, presented in one of those frustrating flash-forward-to-the-climax prologues, seems to have a victim, until the actual climax arrives. By that point, it really doesn't matter, because these characters exist simply to die in one room or survive until they're killed off in another.

The problems pretty much begin and end with the characters in Bragi Schut and Maria Melnik's screenplay. They're little more than types, and the "little more" comes from a series of flashbacks for almost all of them, showing that each one has some tragic and distressing back story. Even those back stories turn out to be part of the movie's game, which eventually reveals why these six strangers were selected to partake in the deadly escape room. Two of them are already dead by the time that mystery is revealed (One of them isn't even around long enough to get a flashback), so it's not as if the characters' histories really matter in terms of developing them as, well, characters.

All six receive a mysterious invitation to participate in a company's latest game of puzzle-solving and door-unlocking, with a prize of $10,000 awarded to anyone who completes it. Zoey (Taylor Russell) is a shy college student with a firm grasp of quantum physics. Ben (Logan Miller) works in the loading dock of a grocery store, and Jason (Jay Ellis) is a successful, cutthroat financial trader. When they arrive at the company's headquarters, they're meet by three others: a veteran of Iraq named Amanda (Deborah Ann Woll), a jokey truck driver named Mike (Tyler Labine), and an escape room aficionado named Danny (Nik Dodani).

Apart from the flashbacks, which show each of the characters surviving some traumatic event, those descriptions are the extent of characterization here. That might be fine as long as the movie's central gimmick compensated for this deficiency.

It doesn't, though. As wicked as the concept of escape rooms designed specifically to kill people may be, the screenplay and director Adam Robitel never quite figure out how to merge the fairly innocuous process of solving an escape room and the terror of impending doom. There's little tension here. That's partly because the characters are weak, but it's mainly because the isolated narrative in each room amounts to little more than watching these bland characters try to figure out puzzles and riddles—some of them connected to their respective pasts.

The filmmakers seem mostly to rely on the elaborate nature of the death traps, from a waiting room that transforms into an oven, to a room made to look and feel like a freezing forest, and to a library with an unstoppable wall moving toward an unmoving one. To be fair, there is one room that comes close to achieving the right mix. It's an upside-down bar, with the players walking on the ceiling and the entire room elevated multiple stories in the air. As the time in the room runs out, sections of the ceiling drop, leaving the characters to balance along the edges of walls or to climb fixtures.

If the prologue is frustrating in how it seems to give away the ending (It doesn't, which is too bad, because the actual ending is an extended, predictable dud), the epilogue is just silly in setting up the inevitable to take place off-screen or the possibility of a sequel—either option being extremely optimistic about our investment in the movie. Escape Room is a concept searching for and never finding characters and tension.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the DVD

Buy the Blu-ray