Adam Robitel’s Escape Room opens with Ben, a stockboy, crashing through a ceiling as the walls of a room grind inward. He cannot solve the puzzle in time. The walls close on him. It is a clean, mean cold open, and for a few minutes the film looks like it might earn it.
Then the title card says three days earlier, and Escape Room becomes a different, lesser movie.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
A puzzle cube and a $10,000 prize
The setup is tidy. A puzzle cube goes out to strangers in Chicago. Zoey is a physics student. Jason is a wealthy daytrader. Ben stocks shelves. Solve the cube, and the company Minos invites you to compete for a $10,000 prize.
The waiting room is the first trap: a giant oven. The contestants are:
- Zoey, the physics student
- Ben, the stockboy
- Jason, the daytrader
- Mike, a truck driver
- Amanda, an Iraq War veteran
- Danny, an escape room enthusiast
Danny dies first, drowning under the ice of a frozen lake. That is when the group learns the rooms are lethal. Amanda falls to her death in an upside-down billiards hall after saving the 8 ball the puzzle needs.
Six survivors, one hospital room
The fourth room is a hospital, and its beds carry the film’s only real idea. Each player is a sole survivor. Mike lived through a mine cave-in. Zoey lived through a plane crash. Danny survived the carbon monoxide poisoning that killed his family. Amanda survived an IED blast. Jason survived a shipwreck in frigid weather. Ben survived a car crash that killed his friends.
Zoey works out that Minos built the rooms around those traumas. The players were chosen, not randomly invited. She quits playing and starts hunting an exit.
That is a strong premise, and Escape Room does not use it. The film runs 99 minutes and spends most of them on the mechanics of the next room rather than on the people the rooms were designed to break. Robitel stages the traps with real atmosphere, and the production design is better than the script deserves. Taylor Russell and Deborah Ann Woll are the two performers who suggest inner lives; the screenplay gives them little to do with them.
Where the game stalls
The cast is capable. Logan Miller, Jay Ellis, Tyler Labine, Nik Dodani and Yorick van Wageningen as the Gamemaster all hit their marks. The problem is not the ensemble. It is that a film about six survivors of separate disasters, hand-picked and re-traumatized by a company called Minos, should feel like it is saying something about grief or exploitation. Escape Room treats all of that as set dressing for the next collapsing floor.
The mixed reviews it drew praised the atmosphere, cast and production design and knocked the familiar plot. That split is fair, and it lands where the score does.
Escape Room is a decent Friday-night trap movie and a wasted one. It has the maze. It never finds the way out of its own premise. A sequel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, followed in 2021.
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