January is really the month where movies go to die. If you don’t believe me, lock yourself in Escape Room.
Six strangers find themselves locked in a fake but deadly game of Escape Room. In order to survive, people need to start dying as the team progress through each room with a chance to win $25,000. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
Think Cabin in the Woods meets Saw meets some other crazy stupid low-level horror movie on Netflix.
The movie ended with more secrets than answers. I feel compelled to demand the studio make a second film to explain why the game master keeps himself a mystery? Nevermind why happened to the two winners who boarded a plane to go to New York City? How do they have access to such cutting edge technology that the game itself disappears from abandon buildings? Did these guys rig the Presidental Election while obtaining everyone’s personal life stories to set up this deadly game? How did they pay the police off? None of it makes sense!
Escape Room presented us with zero new ideas on how to kill people in a controlled environment. There wasn’t much creativity thrown into this one, because writers probably went to some escape rooms and said let’s make this fun by lighting people on fire, have them fall to their death, and for good measure crush them with moving walls. We’ve all seen this over and over again. The genre has almost run out of new and exciting ways to have stupid people die.
There are two things that will happen after this movie. Either escape rooms will lose business to the gullible people who think this is real, or the attractions will see a bump in revenue from excited people who want to experience the same things they saw in the movie.
I’ve never had a desire to visit an escape room and even though I know there are not as violent as the film would make them out to be, the film totally took a unique game and ruined the concept. 2/10
Ten Stars or Less 