Many of us have experienced the tension of being locked in a confined space with only an hour to escape. No, I'm not referring to Auckland's traffic, but rather the current fad of escape rooms that seem to be everywhere at the moment.
It's little wonder Hollywood has mined thecraze for the big screen treatment. All the prerequisites are baked right in for a thriller such as this to grab and run with... and in this case, fall flat on its face at the final exit.
Escape Room takes its cue from (but falls well short of) cult classics such as The Game, Cube, and Saw. It's a lightweight tale of implausible horror that pits six escape room players against the ingenuity of an unknown puppetmaster. The stakes are simple, $10,000 or death—although none are privy to the latter upon entry, of course. If only they'd read the fine print.
There are the usual bunch of archetypes who receive an invitation to play; the shy student, the smarmy stockbroker, a shelf-stacking slacker, the long-distance trucker, the Iraqi war vet and an escape room fanatic whose only seeming purpose is to explain the ins and outs of escape rooms just in case we aren't aware of how they work. None are particularly well-sketched characters, but that's to be expected when life expectancy is this limited.
It's quickly apparent that Escape Room is standard check-your-brain-at-the-door fare. No tricky plot points to trip over or clever culture subverting subtexts here. In fact, the only head-scratching moment comes in the film's finale, which offers one of the more illogical, bizarre and poorly rendered WTF endings I think I've ever seen. Clearly, director Adam Robitel (Insidious: The Last Key) hadn't a clue on how, or when, to end this film.
There are some solid flashpoints of tension early on, but as the ever-dwindling team shift from room to room it all becomes rather episodic and dull. For the record, it took me exactly 99 minutes to escape the theatre, others might get out sooner.
Cast: Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll Director: Adam Robitel Running time: 99 mins Censor: M (Violence & offensive language) Verdict: Can't escape its own stupidity.
