One of the newer films that I will be reviewing, 'Escape Room' (2019) was a film that was quite heavily advertised. Admittedly I spend an ungodly amount of hours on youtube and so I probably see more adverts than the average human, but I still remember seeing this one a lot. Despite this i had no desire to go an watch it. It just looked like a run of the mill horror film which I don't mind watching on streaming services but I won't bother forking out cash to watch on the big screen, mainly because a lot of them are shit. However, 'Escape Room' turned out to actually be semi-decent. Would it have been worth the price of a ticket to watch at the cinema? That is a lot more debatable. The film follows a group of six strangers who all receive an invitation to participate in a new escape room, with a prize of $10,000 should they manage to escape. Shortly upon their arrival they find that this is no ordinary escape room with every room designed to kill them if they do not solve the puzzles in time. The group then have to fight for survival while also working out why they were chosen.
In my review of 'Cube' (1997) yesterday I mentioned that I was initially put off by the film by the fact it looked quite a bit like a 'Saw' film. Well, with 'Cube' I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not the case. With 'Escape Room' I wa unpleasantly surprised to find that it was. It didn't start very much like a 'Saw' film but by the end the the comparisons were pretty unavoidable. It was when the film became more like 'Saw' that it started to lose me. It started off pretty well. The scenes of the group working out all these escape rooms work really well, managing to keep up the excitement and tension and it was a fun watch. The designs of the escape rooms were all visual stimulating and fun, and the puzzles they had to solve were well thought out and not too convoluted. But as the film progressed and the reasons as to why they were all there were revealed it just became everything became far more over the top and ridiculous, so that by the end any intrigue you had in the mystery has been taken over by sighs and eye rolls at every reveal. The ending of the film is the most heinous example of this. The last ten minutes are just an ever growing sequence of laughable moments, building up towards an ending that is hilariously bad. I won't spoilt it here but I swear you'll get a chuckle if you watch it. The film also suffers from a script that is very hit and miss, with some lines of dialogue being massively cliched or laughably stupid. There are also several moments of CGI which are pretty laughable, especially when you consider this film came out last year. If the film had stayed with just being creative with its escape room scenarios and focused less on the outside reasons as to why this had been set up I think it would have worked much better. As it is, the film is very much one of two halfs.
The acting in the film is mostly okay, with no one excelling but no one dropping a turd of a performance either. The weakest of the performances probably comes from Nik Dodani, as Danny Khan, a nerd whose personality boils down to his love of video games and escape rooms, and his absolute naivety to the severity of the situation until it is too late. This again goes to back to the fact that the script is not the strongest and the character of Danny is extremely two-dimensional and cliched, but he is also meant to be a little sympathetic and Dodani's performance mostly just annoyed me. There is one actor who I do want to give a shout out to and that is Jeremy Boado as Business Passenger. This role is a minute and yet it was so horrible that it left a huge impression on me. In just one exclamation of terror, that sounded more like a mild reaction to someone shouting boo in your face, this man managed to ut in the most entertaining performance of the film. Superb.
'Escape Room' is very much a flawed film. It has a pretty weak script and the narrative runs away from itself the longer the film goes on. It also has one of the most hilariously stupid ending I've seen in film in a long while. But it also does have its positives. The design of the majority of the escape rooms is cleverly put together and visually stimulating. The acting, for the most part is decent and works well enough for the film. But mostly it is just fun. Even when it starts to lose the plot towards the end it still manages to keep a sense of fun and enjoyment. Because of this I will recommend it. Despite its flaws it remains a decent little flick, and its short runtime is also a big bonus.