The month of January has historically been a dumping ground for major movie studios. It is the start of what the film community dubs the “dump months” —January and February, as well as August and September. Domestic box office numbers are typically at their lowest during these months, and so studios hold off on releasing any tentpole films and instead opt to release films that have either performed poorly during test screenings, are bad horror films, etc. — essentially, films that the studio doesn’t have much faith in. While there are, of course, some notable exceptions to this rule (The Silence of the Lambs was a late-January 1991 release), Escape Room is certainly not one of them. It’s a sloppily-made, PG-13 Saw rip-off at a time when Saw and movies like it are no longer relevant to the horror genre. Its incredibly uninspired plot, one-dimensional characters, and blatantly unfinished rendering make this easily one of the worst films of 2019 just a few days in.
The film starts off with one of its final scenes, featuring one of the main characters trapped in an escape room, desperately trying to find a way out. This same exact scene then gets played back to us in the last 15 minutes. It’s supposed to set the tone for the entire film, but instead of grabbing the audience and making them invested, its attempt comes across as laughable and monotonous, and its lazy reincorporation certainly doesn’t do the film any favors. After the title sequence, we then witness an introduction to the characters of Zoey (Taylor Russell), an intelligent yet shy college student; Ben (Logan Miller), a grocery store worker and junkie who’s down on his luck; and Jason (Jay Ellis), an uber-masculine, cocky businessman. Speaking in terms of narrative, these three should be the ‘main’ characters, but the film really ends up trying to make us care the most about Zoey and Ben in the end. The character writing isn’t just a structural issue, though, because any semblance of nuance to these characters is completely thrown out the window and instead the focus is purely on their surface-level characteristics. We’re introduced to three other characters at random points throughout the first 15 minutes, and the same thing applies to them too. The writing is lazy to the extreme. Actually, almost everything feels lazy about this film, including the borderline unfinished look. So many shots look unfinished, as though they were rendered in 480p in order to save time. Everything in this film is either dreadfully bland or awful, the dialogue included. Almost every line is laughably bad and cringe-worthy.
The entire premise of each of the rooms is to exploit a major flaw of each of the characters (6 rooms for 6 characters), yet the main drawback to that central idea is that none of these characters are effectively developed enough for it to truly play out. The film, therefore, fundamentally fails to say anything meaningful about the nature of these characters, humanity, or really anything whatsoever. It’s completely tone-deaf and pointless. That’s not to say we shouldn’t ever have dumb horror thrillers, because they can certainly be fun, but Escape Room carries a veil of attempted sincerity with it. It’s trying to make us care about these characters, yet fails spectacularly in the process.
The final ten minutes of this film was, in a word, frustrating. Though it admittedly should have ended before that point, I thought they were taking the plot in a new direction, one I didn’t initially expect. Turns out, they just left it on a confusing cliffhanger to maybe set up a sequel — who even knows. This premise could have been turned into something good if given enough time and talent to construct a narrative with compelling, likable characters, as well as a cohesive plot structure. Escape Room, despite the premise, was far from good, and that ending left a sour taste in my mouth and cemented my dislike of the film as a whole.
Overall, Escape Room is simultaneously a hilariously bad and dreadfully boring experience, one that epitomizes the bottom-of-the-barrel January release. With the Oscars and Golden Globes just around the corner, just go catch up on awards season films instead of wasting your time with a film like this.
Score: 1/5