ESCAPE ROOM (2019)

Studio:      Columbia Pictures
Director:    Adam Robitel
Writer:      Bragi Schut, Maria Melnik
Producer:  Neal H. Moritz, Ori Marmur
Stars:     Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Tyler Labine, Nik Dodani, Jay Ellis, Yorick van Wageningen

Review Score:

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Summary:

Six strangers with a secret connection in common frantically fight to escape a building whose rooms are intricate traps.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Chicago, Illinois – Introverted physics student Zoey Davis, arrogant stockbroker Jason Walker, and alcoholic grocery store clerk Ben Miller separately receive puzzle boxes that appear to come from someone they know. Upon opening their respective boxes, Zoey, Jason, and Ben each find an entry voucher for Minos immersive escape rooms with the lure of a $10,000 prize.

In the third floor waiting room of the Minos building, Zoey, Jason, and Ben meet three other people. The additional players are military veteran Amanda Harper, truck driver Mike Nolan, and obsessive gamer Danny Khan. Amanda notes that all of the magazines in the room are addressed to Dr. WooTan Yu.

The knob comes off the door when Ben tries to leave for a cigarette. Now locked inside the waiting room, the six strangers realize the game has already begun.

Actions taken while trying to follow escape clues cause the room to become an increasingly hot oven. The heat triggers Amanda’s trauma of being burned by an IED blast in Afghanistan. The group eventually finds a way out through a ventilation shaft and narrowly escapes before the room bursts into flames.

In a room made to look like a cabin, Ben deduces that a riddle answer is Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. This triggers a flashback to Ben singing that holiday song while driving drunk during a car accident that killed his friends.

Everyone exits the cabin to find themselves in a freezing snowscape simulation. Specific conditions remind Jason of a boating accident where he killed his roommate to avoid dying from hypothermia.

Over the course of piecing together the room’s clues, Danny falls through an ice floor and drowns in the freezing water underneath. Danny’s death proves to everyone that their lives are in genuine danger.

Zoey, Ben, Jason, Mike, and Amanda escape the cold exterior setting and enter an upside-down bar whose floor gradually falls away over a long elevator shaft. Zoey notices a trophy awarded to Dr. WooTan Yu. The room’s setup triggers Zoey’s trauma of losing her mother in a plane crash that she survived in Vietnam. Amanda falls to her death when she sacrifices herself to retrieve the exit key for the others.

Zoey, Ben, Jason, and Mike enter a room of hospital beds. The four of them notice the beds are made to look like the ones they were in when they recovered from their traumas. Mike mentions a cave-in he survived that killed his brother Kyle. Zoey concludes that all of the players are statistical improbabilities because they are the sole survivors of tragic events, and Minos is conducting a study to see who is the luckiest among the lucky.

A television plays a looping commercial for Dr. WooTan Yu. Reasoning that the game rules need to change so Minos cannot continuously win, Zoey begins smashing monitors and cameras.

The three remaining men discover a countdown trap rigged to release poison connected to an EKG meter. Believing that an elevated heart rate will unlock the exit, Jason convinces Mike to accept defibrillator charges. Jason ends up killing Mike.

Jason realizes that the door will actually unlock from a reduced heart rate. Jason connects himself to the EKG machine and calms his pulse until the exit opens.

Jason and Ben escape as the room fills with gas. Insisting that she needs to continue breaking security equipment, Zoey chooses to remain behind. Zoey passes out from the poison.

Jason and Ben find themselves in an optical illusion room. When they open a hatch in the floor, the two men start hallucinating from psychotropic drugs. While tripping, Jason and Ben fight each other for a single syringe of antidote. Jason dies when Ben inadvertently knocks Jason’s head into an overhang. Ben administers the antidote and escapes through the hatch.

Minos agents enter the hospital room to clean up. Having played possum, Zoey knocks out both agents and recovers a handgun.

Ben races to solve the riddles of a room made to look like a study. Ben narrowly avoids being crushed by contracting walls to escape into a warehouse with a makeshift control center.

Games Master WooTan Yu welcomes Ben as the escape room’s winner. Yu explains that he didn’t create the traps, but he operates them as part of an elaborate spectacle for wealthy clients seeking macabre entertainment. Yu begins strangling Ben.

Zoey enters and shoots Yu. Zoey and Ben fight Yu until Ben gets the handgun and kills him. Zoey and Ben escape the building.

Detective Li later brings Zoey back to the building to show her that every room is empty and there is no evidence her claims about what happened are true. Shocked and dismayed, Zoey realizes that WooTan Yu is an anagram for “no way out.”

Six Months Later – Zoey shows Ben her collection of research revealing that Minos created cover stories to explain the deaths of Danny, Amanda, Mike, and Jason. Zoey also explains how she found coordinates hidden inside the Minos logo that lead to an unlisted industrial building in Manhattan. Ben agrees to fly to New York with Zoey to expose the conspiracy.

Meanwhile, a shadowy figure oversees testing of an elaborate Minos simulation designed to turn Zoey’s airplane into another deadly escape room.

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Review:

If you thought Jigsaw’s elaborate death traps broke believability for what was logistically improbable and financially impractical, wait until you see the craziness “Escape Room” cooks up.

Usually in a horror movie, solving an intricate puzzle box summons a leather-clad hell priest to put hooks in your flesh. For introverted college student Zoey, self-centered stockbroker Jason, and unkempt screw-up Ben, it unlocks an invitation to Minos, the most immersive escape room experience this side of John Kramer’s grime-stained warehouse.

The number of stock stereotypes increases to an even half-dozen with the introductions of geeky gamer Danny, military veteran Amanda, and bearded truck driver Mike. This second trio doesn’t benefit from backstory exposition like Zoey, Jason, and Ben do. That awards Danny, Amanda, and Mike additional roles as potential moles, or at least as red herrings until the secret connection between participants (there always is one, isn’t there?) finally comes out in the open.

With the ethnically, socially, and gender diverse sextet assembled, the game wastes no time getting underway. Summarizing what happens next would only be a spoiler for someone who has never seen “Cube,” “Fermat’s Room,” or any thriller with a similar puzzle-based setup before.

When the waiting room suddenly turns into an unbearably blazing oven, the players deduce that the mysterious Minos Company may be a conspiratorial cabal trying to kill them. Those suspicions are confirmed as the riddles unlocking exits reveal increasingly deadly rooms seemingly designed by Cesar Romero’s Joker and Burgess Meredith’s Penguin. Unstable ice over freezing water, a gradually falling floor above a bottomless elevator shaft, and collapsing walls modeled after the Death Star’s trash compactor are just some of the devious traps the sixsome has to outthink to escape the building alive.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it were revealed that Bragi Schut and Maria Melnik’s screenplay started out as a “Saw” sequel spec script. In a world where Lionsgate was still releasing annualized entries in their venerable ‘torture porn’ franchise, “Escape Room” might seem like a mere imitator for employing a nearly identical concept while following a familiar formula.

Yet “Escape Room” instead arrives at a time when that space of cinema has a void in need of filling. And with its PG-13 rating replacing gratuitous gore with stylized setpieces, “Escape Room” plays out more palatably as a two-bite cupcake of a thriller ideal for a pleasing, if fleeting, sugar rush.

“Escape Room” earns its originality from Edward Thomas’ production design, Cecelia van Straaten and Mark Walker’s art direction, and Tracy Perkins’ set decoration. Spatial realism may go through the glass on its way out the window. But several creatively cool setups for settings like an upside-down billiards bar, snowed-in cabin, and optical illusion living room pave over implausibility with terrifically distinct visuals.

Eye candy becomes essential to immersion since individual escape rooms prevent viewers from playing along. You’ll figure out a “you’ll go down in history” clue well before players do, if you haven’t already from reading it here. Other than that, you can’t solve many mysteries because the movie doesn’t always divulge necessary details. More often than not, it’s a passive experience of waiting for characters to physically retrieve items or puzzle things out through trial and error actions we can’t take part in.

Suspense instead comes from watching these people face constant peril. Accordingly, any nail-biting becomes proportionate to how you feel about the characters personally. Some are shallowly developed while at least one is intentionally designed to be unlikable. Individual mileage thus varies regarding how vicariously any viewer can live through everyone.

The film stubs its toe at the opening credits with an unnecessary flash-forward meant to start with a scare. It only deflates tension when that scene reappears chronologically 80 minutes later. “Escape Room” mangles its other bookend by ending five minutes too late with an epilogue that should have been saved to open a sequel.

But starting at the top with director Adam Robitel and continuing down through all six key actors, everyone turns in respectable work meant to manufacture a mainstream movie whose middle generally earns B grades for entertainment. If “Escape Room” ends up as the heir apparent to “Saw,” it’s a suitable replacement for tapping that vein of ticking bomb thrills. Just don’t think about the lack of logic too hard. Preferably, don’t think about it at all.

Review Score: 60

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