Review: Escape Room

A group of people of wildly diverse backgrounds and temperaments are invited by a mysterious person to potentially win $10,000 by finding their way out of an escape room. Well, actually it’s a series of rooms with a series of clues. People yell, people die, and the mysterious host has a reason why he/she has invited these specific people to engage in this task. The people? Taylor Russell is a shy student, Nik Dodani is a geeky escape room enthusiast, Deborah Ann Woll is a former soldier, Tyler Labine is a trucker, Logan Miller is a convenience store employee, and Jay Ellis plays a slick stockbroker.

Although not an inherently bad concept to centre a film around, this 2019 film from director Adam Robitel (who did one of the “Insidious” sequels) takes that inherently not bad idea and gives us an M-rated (or PG-13 for you Yanks) version of “Saw”. Or more specifically “Jigsaw”, actually. Don’t get me wrong, there’s potential to get something worthwhile out this idea. However, what we get is about the least imaginative, least interesting direction Robitel and screenwriters Bragi Schut (the underrated Nic Cage movie “Season of the Witch”) and Maria Melnik (TV’s “American Gods”) could take the concept of an escape room plot. In addition to the “Jigsaw” comparisons, the writers fail to populate their story with compelling or even fully-realised characters. Instead we get a lot of arguing and snippets of back-story at best. As for the escape room itself, it’s all surprisingly dull, uninteresting stuff. When you finally meet the person behind it all, they deliver the exact speech you expect them to, because it’s the same fucking deal with anything remotely of this film’s ilk. At times it’ll also remind you of the “Final Destination” films, but this film’s dealing with ‘survivor’s guilt’ is completely half-arsed and botched. Some have survived disasters of their own making that involved the deaths of other people, perhaps making them more deserving of this ‘punishment’ or ‘test’. I’m not sure a war survivor or the survivor of a mining disaster really deserve to be put in the same ‘room’ as people like that.

On the plus side, I’d like to see lead actress Taylor Russell in literally anything without the words “Escape” and/or “Room” in the title. She’s got a bit of charisma and charm about her. The rest of the cast are pretty average, but not terrible. The problem is that there’s only two that are remotely likeable. No one is full-on Bart from “Cabin Fever”, but they’re a pretty abrasive lot including repeat offender Logan Miller from the overrated “Love, Simon”. The room designs, simply from a visual standpoint, are interesting and unique but that’s a prerequisite for this kind of film if you ask me. You’re not really earning brownie points for that, I’m afraid.

Marginally better than I expected, this film suffers from a fairly bland and unimaginative treatment of a potentially interesting central idea. It looks alright and Taylor Russell is likeable, but there’s a lot of shouting, swearing and jerk characters otherwise. Not good, not terrible. Meh.

Rating: C