Film Review: Escape Room

"You Wanna Control Your Life. But Life Isn't A Science Experiment..."

With the beginning of 2019 primarily loaded with non-fictional dramatic adaptations and Oscar bait, the chance to take a reasonable comfort break from reality and back into the realm of mindless fictional horror comes around this week in the form of Escape Room, a strange oddity of a film which attempts to blend a whole catalogue of inspirations for a cinematic cocktail which seems neither good or awful, instead falling into that forgettable pot of big screen mediocrity which many horror pictures can unfortunately succumb to. Directed by horror genre stalwart, Adam Robitel, whose previous credits include the likes of Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension and Insidious: The Last Key, Escape Room states to have a screenplay from the minds of both Bragi F. Schut and Maria Melnik, but with so many glaring cliches at the heart of the action, one could argue that any cinephile with a faint knowledge of horror could have supplied the script at the heart of a film which somewhat revels knowingly at the fact that every single narrative turn seems to feature one cinematic rip off after cinematic rip off, and whilst Escape Room clearly fails to bring anything fresh or original to the genre in which it sits, Robitel's latest is still a functional and partially entertaining high concept B-Movie with enough lavish silliness to make you just laugh at the absurdity of it all. 

Amidst the tick list of the many cinematic "inspirations" present within the narrative, Escape Room comes across as a oddball hybrid of Saw, Hellraiser and the morbidly overlooked Cube, just without the jaw-dropping exploitation violence which made each so memorable first time around. Beginning by placing all the chess pieces into position as we our introduced to an array of underwhelming and underdeveloped lead characters, the action predominantly follows Taylor Russell's (Lost in Space) Zoey, a timid and whispering scientific genius who after receiving a strange, indecipherable lock box, takes up the opportunity from the shadowy "Gamemaster" to solve his own personal "Escape Room" and the chance of winning ten thousand dollars. Cue absolutely ridiculous and impractical escape scenarios, shouty, swearing, panicky characters and of course, cringe inducing dialogue which includes each and every character reading out even the most minor part of the plot in case the audience member at the back of the screening just happened to miss it, Escape Room seems to revel in its' unashamedly low budget nature, resulting in a sense that although the many weaknesses are as clear as day, the more silly the narrative gets, the more downright enjoyable the action ultimately becomes. With Deborah Ann Woll undoubtedly supplying the best performance of the bunch, continuing her excellent dramatic chops seen most clearly in Netflix's Daredevil, Escape Room is an utter shambles and a complete mess, but with enough standout ripeness and a more than favourable runtime, Robitel's latest is actually quite fun and at least made me leave the cinema with a questionable smirk.

Overall Score: 5/10