Delayed Reaction: Escape Room

Premise: Strangers find themselves invited to a deadly escape room.

 

It took me a while to realize this, but Escape Room is a pretty perfect idea for a certain brand of horror. There's a lot of Saw in the bones of this movie. Instead of leaning on the violence though, it's about characters using their wits to get out of a situation. Lord knows my complaint about most horror is that it requires the characters to act like idiots, so that's an improvement. The absurdity of the film gives room for a lot of inventiveness. My One Big Leap for the movie is believing there's a group who can arrange these escape rooms. If I'm believing that, then go ahead and make the escape rooms as intricate as possible.

 

I enjoyed this movie more than I expected, and I'm also trying to figure out why I didn't go in expecting it to be better. The setup of the movie is clean. It keeps the focus on the game rooms and not why there are game rooms. I assume future movies will build up the shadowy company more. For now, I'm fine with the vague notion of it.

 

Nice variety in the cast. I'll say that I didn't predict who would and wouldn't survive. I mean, they do give Logan Miller away at the very beginning. I figured Deborah Ann Woll was a lot safer. I keep feeling like I've seen Taylor Russell somewhere else. I mean, I guess she did have a small part in Before I Fall (also with Logan Miller, actually), but I mean something more substantial. I guess she just has one of those faces. She brings good nerd energy though. She obviously looks like a movie star, but I can buy the character.

 

I'm seeing this movie only a couple days before the sequel comes out. I'm curious how my opinion of the franchise will change, but this sure looks like the start of what could be a long running horror franchise that never reaches above the point of being pretty entertaining and doesn't aspire to anything more. And I mean that as a good thing. Not every movie has to be a classic. There's plenty of room for entertaining time fillers.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend