Escape Room: Unlocking a new franchise.
It’s not hard to see what the goal of Escape Room is. The movie sets up a large-scale plot, with a vast conspiracy surrounding the games that the victims in the movie go through. You can practically feel Sony begging for a new series to make easy money off of with the cliffhanger this movie ends on. Luckily for them Escape Room is an entertaining enough movie that has enough intriguing elements to make for a good starting point.
The one thing that really holds this movie back at times are the characters. Not the actors mind you, who in general do a really good job, and make the situation they are in feel believable, and make their actions feel understandable. The problem is just how archetypical the characters are. The nerd is unbearably nerdy. The lines that come out of characters is at times bad enough to cause involuntary eye rolling. The characters are so standard at times that planned twists in the plot don’t tend to work when it is obvious to guess what the surprise is as soon as the characters are introduced. The saving grace for these characters are the actors that make these characters feel alive and do their best with material that at times is just lazy.
The true stars of this movie are the rooms and the dangers located inside. This is very much a aspect familiar to those who have seen the Saw movies. A highly enjoyable part of the movie is trying to guess the answers along with the characters, while also gleefully waiting to see what will happen when failure occurs. Like the aforementioned Saw series, as well as the Final Destination series, the roller coaster ride aspect of trying to find out what the characters face is what makes this movie truly fun. The rooms in this game also reach the point of absurdity, without crossing the line. Rooms will have you wondering how it is at all possible to create the room in a building but show enough details to keep it from being completely unbelievable. Also, even though the movie ends up in an all too familiar place with SPOILERS! the villains of the money being evil rich people bored with life and using others pain as a means of entertaining, End Spoilers the movie does a good job of making the predictable villains still easy to hate, and make you want to see them get taken down.
Escape Room is a fun movie, that can be a bit predictable, but it is still a fun ride to go on. The movie does leave you wanting more, and the scenarios proposed make the idea of a sequel fun to look forward to. Time will tell if this becomes a horror franchise we see an entry in every couple years, but there is certainly an entertaining framework set up that will be fun to see be fleshed out in the future.
3.5 / 5
