Escape Room

For some reason Escape Rooms seem to be a thing, and I don't just mean out in the real world. The fad has inspired film makers and across 2 years we've had at least 4 movies with them at the core and 3 of them were simply called Escape Room. Original stuff huh!

This is the second of four that I've watched, the first being from the same year and starring Skeet Ulrich/Sean Young. That one was a tad better than this effort.

For those of you unfamiliar with an Escape Room it's a tourist attraction where a group of people are locked in a room (Or series of) and have to look at their surroundings solving puzzles in order to escape within an assigned time.

Here we see a group of friends participate in one for someones birthday and the experience gradually goes from fun to lethal. Whereas the Ulrich movie was supernatural this goes in more of a Saw (2004) direction.

Though the concept is sound the execution is rather lacking. Sure it looks the part but the delivery and the threat is poorly paced and the characters are simply not likeable. They range from obnoxious to blatantly bad folk that you can't exactly cheer on.

To make matters worse the movie fizzles out at the end. I believe a finale can make a terrible film suddenly great or a great film suddenly terrible. This made an average film, even more average.

The Good:

Solid concept

A few interesting puzzles

The Bad:

Naff deaths

Culminates in very little

In a parallel world, Jigsaw has a brother, but sadly he was none too bright, and instead of coming up with a plan to punish, he has half an idea, it's not a bad concept, but it's obscured by ideas elsewhere, and poorly executed.

The idea is actually rather good, but it simply fails to satisfy on so many levels. First of all, I didn't really like any of the characters, so to be honest I couldn't care less when their numbers started dwindling. Many of the threads simply didn't hang together, it was almost all utterly nonsensical, so hard to believe in about 90% of what was going on.

The masked figure waiting in the wings...is lame!!!! It's so overdone it's unreal.

Nice ideas, but too flawed. 3/10

I can only guess they didn't have enough money to shoot everything in the script as it felt like watching one of these kind of films with a dozen or so scenes edited out.

The production values, photography and sets were pretty good for this but largely it seemed the writing let this film down.

I watched all the way through expecting a plot of some kind to develop but it never really did.

Early on a character is introduced and a big thing is made of them leaving, we never see or hear from them again, okay a red herring perhaps, but what spend five minutes of the film on it. Things go along pretty much in this fashion until the end credits.

The puzzles were mostly not very puzzle like and the fact that the characters guessed and solved what some of them were at all didn't seem very realistic at all other than it being the only way to move the film along.

The ending left several loose ends and was ultimately completely unfulfilling.

In LA, a group of friends has gathered to celebrate Tyler's birthday. His girlfriend Christen Wills has six tickets to an escape room.

These are the unappealing beautiful people. Their dialogue is boring. They are boring. The movie spends 20 minutes at a boring unnecessary dinner party. The first half is nothing but boring. It's not until somebody dies that the escape room gets a little tense. It just takes too long to kill somebody. The only actor I remember from something else is Elisabeth Hower and she's stuck in a cage for most of this even if she's naked. These characters are nothing. This might work if it gets to the killing faster. The ending could have gotten a final twist but it even does that wrong. The escape room is fun for about 15 minutes but that's it for this movie.

The story was nothing special, rather weak and the plot was never exciting, rather boring. Overall a weak B-movie.