Last year around this time, I started off 2018 with a horror movie, Insidious: The Last Key, and it ended up making my 10 worst list. Well, I can’t say the same about Escape Room which has enough creativity to match its concept.
The movie follows a group of people from different walks of life: (a shy college student, a grocery store worker, a female war veteran, a money-hungry broker, a coal miner, and a know-it-all.)
Together they’re brought by a mysterious corporation who want them to play an escape room challenge and the first one to leave gets $10,000. They’re pretty much standard movie victims.
Once they meet each other, the game begins and they only have so much time to escape. Spoiler alert: The very room they meet in is the escape room and after they survive, they, you guessed it, move on to another room.
We do get some backstory on each of the characters and each time you see the burn on the veteran’s back or someone trying to stay afloat in an ocean, you can bet that information will come in handy later.
The idea of group of people stranded together to fight for their lives planted in a screenplay based on a real-world phenomenon might have the potential to exhaust itself very quickly, but this movie manages to pack just enough thrills to hold it together.
Another thing has going for it is the camaraderie of its cast who prove to be smart, funny, and resourceful and you definitely need the latter in order to survive the death traps this movie has to offer.
The finale does get a bit bloated and we’re obviously going to get a sequel, but it might be more intriguing.
Suffice it to say, I’d rather see a sequel to this than either Insidious or The Nun.
This game’s worth playing.
Grade: B
(Rated PG-13 for terror/perilous action, violence, some suggestive material and language.)
