“Escape Room” Movie Review

    We enter the new year in a rather unusual place.  While January is typically a slow month for movies, 2019 looks to start the new year off a little more promisingly.  While theaters are still filled with some incredible 2018 holdovers such as “Aquaman” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”, we can seemingly also look forward to movies such as “Glass”, “A Dog’s Way Home”, and “Escape Room”.  We decided to go see “Escape Room” over some of the 2018 holdovers this week based primarily on the strength of the trailers.  The film looked interesting and had a very unique looking style.
    I knew there was a decent chance it might not turn out well, but sometimes you have to give a movie a chance as well.  I was hoping for something more in the vain of “The Cabin in the Woods”.  Something intelligent and self aware with it’s humor.  What I got wasn’t exactly in that vain, although it was entertaining in it’s own respect.

    The film focuses on six strangers who all are invited to a mysterious escape room.  The strangers all have a secret in common and must survive an escape room with life or death steaks.  START OF SPOILER: One complaint about the characters in the film is that by only showing three of the six characters backstories in the beginning, I immediately knew which characters were going to be killed first.  END OF SPOILER

    The film succeeds in building suspense throughout from the beginning until the end.  The ending however, is very frustrating.  I don’t want to spoil the ending, but there isn’t much to spoil either...which is part of the problem.  I also don’t tend to like sequel baiting which this movie is very guilty of.

    “Escape Room” is a movie that focused more on style than substance.  To quote a fellow movie goer as she left our theater, “the movie would have been a lot better if they had paid for a script”.  The movie pulls a J.J. Abrams, it creates this elaborate mystery box approach with no plans to answer all the many questions it creates.  If you want questions answered, you better hope the next screenwriter is creative because the buck has been passed to him.

    “Escape Room” is ultimately a fun but pointless film.  Just don’t bother trying to figure out what is going on, it is just a waste of time and energy.

Grade: C+