New puzzle-trap thriller takes a simple premise and makes you want to stay till the end
Escape Room is much better than it might have been.
ESCAPE ROOM (Adam Robitel). 100 minutes. Opens Friday (January 4). See listing. Rating: NNN
Escape Room is “What if escape rooms but real?” and it’s such a simple conceit that it’s amazing we don’t already have four Black Mirror episodes about it. (Fun fact: Charlie Brooker made his bones with Dead Set, a reality-TV parody in which the Big Brother housemates remain oblivious to a zombie outbreak in England, and then wonder whether it’s all just a prank to get them to leave.)
Alternately, it’s a Saw movie without the pointless sadism and nihilism that drive that franchise. We may not get Tobin Bell whispering riddles, but neither do we worry that the actors need a tetanus shot. And after last year’s grindingly dull Insidious fourquel, it’s great to see director Adam Robitel display some energy and visual invention. Blazing heaters! Freezing winterscapes! Upside-down rooms! Creepy video monitors! These things aren’t interesting by themselves, trust me.
Anyway, the plot: in Chicago, six generic but appealing types – nervous quantum theorist (Taylor Russell), ice-cold money manager (Jay Ellis), scarred veteran (Deborah Ann Woll), chatty older guy (Tyler Labine), frazzled slacker (Logan Miller) and game-room superfan (Nik Dodani) – arrive at a nondescript office building for a chance to win $10,000 playing the greatest escape room yet devised… only to find that the challenges are not only real, but really lethal. (Another difference from the Saw movies: everyone here actively chooses to play the game, even if they didn’t understand the stakes.)
The script focuses more on elaborate problem-solving than on the characters, which means the actors have to work to flesh out their characters – a task at which Russell, Woll and Labine are especially well suited – and the PG-13 rating means nobody has to dig around in their eye socket for a key. (Thanks for that one, Saw II.)
It could stand to lose about 20 minutes and at least one ending, but for a January horror movie, Escape Room is surprisingly decent. Also, it has puzzles, and puzzles are cool.
