For all you regular readers (of which I count a solid 0, not even my own mothers reads these regularly) you may be thinking 'but Rob you have already reviewed this film'. First of all, how informal of you calling me Rob, and secondly calm yourself down there because this is in fact a completely different film, all be it with the exact same title. Actually, saying that it is a completely different film is maybe pushing it too far as both 'Escape Room' (2017), which is what we shall be reviewing today, and 'Escape Room' (2019) both follow the same basic premise of a group of people in an escape room which suddenly turns into a death trap. I can confirm that the 2019 film stands head and shoulders above the 2017 one, and even that one isn't great. I should also point out that this is 'Escape Room' directed by Will Wernick. That is because there is yet another film called 'Escape Room' which also came out in 2017. Three films with exactly the same name in the span of 2 years! Ludicrous. As I mentioned earlier, this film follows a group of friends who are all out for a meal for one of their birthdays. Christen (Elizabeth Hower), the partner of the birthday boy Tyler (Evan Williams), surprises the group with tickets for an escape room. At first the escape room seems normal and the group are enjoying solving the puzzles. However, the night soon becomes deadly when traps start to kill the group off.
This film is pretty terrible. However, I also don't think it is as terrible as a lot of the reviews I saw for it would suggest with some people saying it is the worst film they had ever seen. They clearly have never seen 'The Jurassic Dead' (2017) which I reviewed yesterday (shameless plug). On a technical level the film is pretty sound. It is edited and shot well and the sound and lighting are also good. The special effects are also pretty decent. On a technical level there is very little I can say negatively about it, except that is just a bit bland to look at. This would probably not be a problem if the narrative, script and acting weren't so shit. And I truly mean shit. There were twenty minutes of this film where I was properly invested, and that was when the group first arrived in the escape room and were just solving puzzles normally. I actually enjoyed watching them work out these puzzles and would go so far as to say they were slightly creative At the very least it made me want to go to an escape room. Everything before this point was boring and everything after it was laughably bad. If this film was just the group solving a real escape room I might have enjoyed it more. Instead you have to deal with an absolute stinker of a script. The film is effectively a rip off of 'Saw', with the evil mastermind working behind the scenes to kill these people for some reason. It sets ups issues with three of the characters which could explain why they were in there, but these conflicts in the end don't matter at all. The ending tries to explain it a little bit but it does a terrible job at it. In trying to be ambiguous and 'clever' it is instead ridiculous and laughable. The film also has some of the worst dialogue I have ever heard. Genuine face palm stuff. Horrible.
I have already mentioned the terrible acting in this film but it deserves its own paragraph (I say as though I don't always devote a paragraph to the acting). The performances aren't all that terrible before they get to the escape room. When they are just sat around eating and chatting together they're all semi-competent. But as soon as any kind of conflict or need to show emotion comes in to play they all flounder. Of course, none of the actors are helped by the atrocious script but I'm not sure the best script in the world would have helped. The characters are all basically written to be caricatures and turn into full blown cartoons as soon as they are asked to show emotion. The biggest culprit in this is Evan Williams as Tyler. I think he is meant to be showing a man under immense pressure and stress who has almost lost mind as a result. What he is actually doing is basically playing the character as a supervillain. I said that the second half of this film was laughably bad and this performance has a good amount to do with that. Elizabeth Hower also deserves a mention for one scene in particular near the end. This is meant to be a scene of high emotion and conflict but her performance is so bad that all of that is lost. I half expected her to turn around and say that the escape plan was her idea for how little she seemed to care about her current plight. The acting on the whole is shocking, but I would be lying if I said it also didn't make me chuckle a couple of times.
'Escape Room' is the second worst film I have ever seen called 'Escape Room'. The first act is boring, the second act starts pretty interesting but falls off a cliff, and the final act is laughably bad. Technically it is decent, if a little dull, but everything else is pretty much disastrous. The narrative is horrendous, the script is abysmal and the less said about the acting the better. This is not one I will be going back to and I strongly advise you don't take the first step in watching it in the first place. I did mention in my intro that there was another film called 'Escape Room' that also came out in 2017 which you can also expect to see me review soon. Will it be better than either of the other two? My hopes aren't high.