IN THEATRES: Escape Room

A group of strangers are invited to take part in a contest. Lured by the promise of $10,000USD, they accept.

What they soon realise is that the game is specifically designed to each of them. If they fail, they will die...

Altocelarophobia: the fear of large enclosed spaces.

As far back as I can remember I have had a fear of high ceilings. You name it: churches, gyms, pretentious living rooms. If I am moving I can work through it, but if I have to stay in one place (like school assemblies, where you have to sit on the ground) then the world flips upside down and it feels like gravity is going to cease and I'll plummet to my death on the ceiling above.

I have not had a bad experience with it in years (and I only found out it had a name just before I wrote this review), and I thought I had grown out of it - until about halfway through Escape Room, when our heroes enter an upside-down bar.

And then the floor-ceiling starts falling away in sections and our heroes have to cling to the walls, bar and - in one case - the pool table, to stop from plummeting to their deaths.

Watching this nightmare visualised on a huge screen triggered that old fear, and I was soon crouched over in my seat, rocking back and forth, squeezing my knees, trying to regain my bearings. Of all the movies, I had to get a full-on panic attack in the middle of friggin' Escape Room?!?

Long story short, Escape Room is not a great movie. It's a fun movie at times - and damn terrifying in that one scene - but watching it did feel like a very specific kind of cinematic comfort food (aside from the upside-down hell scene):

Take a fun premise, spruce it up with some cool ideas, include one terrific set piece, and top it all off with an underwhelming third act burnished with a couple extra endings.

The cast are good - it’s always good to see Tyler Labine in something - though the characters are stock: Zoey (Taylor Russell) is the shy student; Danny (Nik Dodani), the game nerd; Amanda (Deborah Ann Woll), the ballsy woman; Mike (Tyler Labine), the blue collar guy; Jason (Jay Ellis), the slick business shark; and Ben (Logan Miller), the burnout, who nobody believes in.

While the script does deploy some interesting reveals, there’s no real sense of that change as they attempt to escape their predicament.

The main problem with Escape Room is that its concept should have either been expanded in a way that truly foregrounded the characters' fears, and forced them to overcome them; or push the concept to its most ludicrous extreme.

Escape Room has some good ideas for the characters and their relationship with the game, but the way it deploys these ideas comes off as either a cheat or super-predictable.

And while it goes for broke with the frozen cabin environment and Tim's Upside House of Terrors, the set pieces fall off in terms of peril.

The movie also makes the mistake of starting with a flash forward to the final set piece - while it gets the audience into the world of the story and sets up the rules of the scenario, it also neutered the drama by turning all bar one of the cast into dead bodies. While there is a certain suspense to be gained from knowing of the danger, the audience’s awareness of the group’s fate, combined with the stock nature of the supporting characters, lowers the stakes.

Escape Room is a totally serviceable thriller that does not stick the landing. 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond called The James Bond Cocktail Hour. Every episode, we do a review of one of the books and one of the movies, picked at random. 

In the latest episode we review the 1968 novel Colonel Sun, written by Kingsley Amis. Subscribe on iTunes.