Like an appetizer plate of peanut-butter-stuffed-onion, the brand-spanking-new 2019 movie year has arrived to the pleasure of no one. As per usual, sir will begin the meal with a horror movie consisting of ideas other horror films threw away, directed by somebody with incriminating photos of studio heads, and starring a cast sequestered from a random raid on the local 7-11. You know nobody loves a new movie year quite like I do.
While everybody with an ounce of taste this week is at a real movie scented with a fresh sprig of Oscar, your sullen teen can sit with me and enjoy Escape Room, somebody’s idea of how funny it would be if you took these experiences seriously. The film has the standard trappings of the first meat of the new season, but also –surprisingly- has some innovation, completely unnecessary for the purpose of this exercise of course, but highly appreciated nonetheless. The basic premise is that this particular Escape Room is real, as in the people in it must figure out how to escape or they will die. There are worse premises.
Escape rooms are, of course, all the rage these days. For a bunch of $$$, you and your friends get “locked” in a room and the most dominant among you bosses everybody around for an hour or so while you “solve” puzzles to “get out,” even though these two things should be completely unrelated. Escape Room simply cut all the crap. The “locked room” is a locked room. There is immediate human danger and you can’t just beg for a hint; unsolved puzzles lead to death.
Six seemingly random folks all receive puzzle boxes. Actually, I’m guessing it was more like 600 folks and these six happened upon the solution – puzzle boxes are really hard to open … especially if you don’t know you’re supposed to open it. The box gives its champion an invitation, and pretty soon the sucker who bothered solving a random distraction is locked in a room where the temperature is quickly rising to 451F. Here, Escape Room did itself a few favors: 1) it constructed legitimate, tangible danger 2) it made puzzles solvable for the audience just in case you’re playing along (HA!) 3) it had the common sense to present a really annoying character, Danny (Nik Dodani), and kill him off first.
The downside to all this is Escape Room plays like a non-torture porn version of Saw. The “rooms” are elaborately constructed to be lethal and the movie loses somebody new with each new iteration, like Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (the original Saw film). It’s harder to enjoy a film once you realize it’s just tame Saw. Oooh, and I just got a Tame Saw for Christmas I can’t wait to try it out on some balsa wood.
For the first film of the year, Escape Room is surprisingly watchable. I’d never call it “good,” exactly, but it kept my attention long enough to see which waiter-of-tomorrow would be left standing. Adding a genuinely lethal threat to the Escape Room fad of today isn’t exactly innovative, and, yet, several scenes almost smacked of clever a little, maybe. Maybe not.
♪This is one happening room
Done up like a pharaoh’s tomb
There’s a man with an asp over there
Tellin’ me, “check under that chair.”
I think it’s time we stop, people,
Kiss the ground
Everybody search clues all around
There’s puzzled lines being drawn
If we’re still here, then everybody’s wrong
“Hey you! Speak up your mind
The clock’s a runnin’ and we are far behind
I think it’s time we stop, people,
Kiss the ground
Everybody search clues all around♫
Rated PG-13, 100 Minutes
Director: Adam Robitel
Writer: Bragi F. Schut and Maria Melnik
Genre: Saw-light, Saw-blight, first Saw I Saw tonight
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: The Saw starved
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Enemies of horror
♪ Parody Inspired by “For What It’s Worth”
