Have you ever seen Cube? It’s an interesting sci-fi thriller from 1997 that I remember renting in middle school. I probably haven’t seen it since I was a teenager, but remember that it was about a group of strangers that find themselves locked in a building and must solve a series of puzzles and avoid deathtraps in order to get out. Escape Room is just a crappier version of that. You might also be thinking that I just described the basic plot of all of the Saw sequels and you would be correct. So, Escape Room basically answers the question of what the Saw movies would be like if you stripped out all of the gore and the interesting villain. That’s great because I was totally wondering that.
Six living stereotypes (burnout loser, tough girl, quiet, smart girl, etc.) receive invitations to the ultimate escape room and accept the invite because $10,000 is promised to anyone that can solve it. I would like to point out that there are also exactly six characters in Cube. Anyway, it quickly becomes apparent that the traps are real and the characters start dying off. It also becomes apparent that the people that put this together have done their homework and have incorporated elements of the characters’ private lives into the proceedings, kinda like the Michael Douglas movie The Game, except less interesting. The payoff is obvious and the motivation of the villains is something that we’ve seen a million times.
I don’t mind necessarily ripoffs and I didn’t exactly expect this to be a cinematic breakthrough, but I do mind being bored. The failure of Escape Room isn’t that it’s derivative, it’s that it’s so goddamn generic and safe. The characters are ones that you’ve seen a million times and, unless this is the first movie that you’ve ever fucking seen, you could just shout out what they are going to do. Spoiler alert if you ate a lot of paint chips as a kid: the smart girl figures things out, the hothead asshole turns on people, the tough girl sacrifices herself and the loser finds his strength. If the screenwriter did anything but throw darts at a board of clichés, then they need to learn better time management. Aside from that, 90% of the film is just watching these people go from room-to-room. It’s enter room-someone dies-solve puzzle-next room. That’s fucking it. I mean, I know it’s called Escape Room, but rarely has a film stuck so hard to its core premise. This shit gets old fast and I quickly found myself counting down the characters to know how many rooms I had left until the end.
All of this could have been saved if the film wasn’t so goddamn safe. I was at least entertained by the first four or five Saw movies, but the buckets of gore and increasingly cartoonish traps were a large part of that. This is a PG-13 movie and even that rating is pushing it. Every death is either off-screen or just bloodless and the entire thing is just a shrieking ball of blandness. You want to make a derivative movie? Fucking fine, but at least give me something to look at.
I’m a 34-year-old man that has never done an escape room, so I’m probably not the core audience for this. If you have kids in middle school, they might enjoy this and you can have the peace of mind knowing that they won’t see anything remotely interesting. For me, I just kept thinking about movies that did more with basically the same premise. This isn’t even awful; it’s just an effortless combination of bits from other movies that makes no attempt to either innovate anything or shock the audience. Stay home and watch Cube instead.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Room_(film)#/media/File:Escape_Room_(2019_poster).png
