If you’re looking for something new… keep looking.
There was an Escape Room horror movie that came to theaters a while back that I really wanted to check out. As the kids say “this ain’t it”.
It’s Tyler’s birthday, and he and his friends are all out celebrating. There’s food, drinks, presents, and tension. Tyler’s longtime girlfriend got him a present and that goes against what they have done in the past. See he and his friends agreed that they would NOT give each other presents for their birthdays and well, she went against the rules.
Chrissy (Tyler’s GF) got them all tickets to go to the new hot thing (in 2017 I guess this was true) an “Escape Room”. It’s a room/rooms that everyone is locked into and they have a certain amount of time to solve the puzzles and get out. (I’m explaining this for the folks that have been under a rock the last five or so years.) All but one of them agrees to play. On the way to the place, the rest are a bit more skittish after they realize they have to give up their smartphones as well as their wallets. They all reluctantly agree and are blindfolded, shuffled off to an unknown and undisclosed area to begin the game.
Everyone wakes up paired with someone else except for Tyler and Chrissy. They are in separate rooms and Tyler finds out that Chrissy is basically the “prize” as she is caged and alone. They have one hour to solve the puzzles and release Chrissy, finishing the game. It isn’t until the first group fails their game (more on that later) and is murdered in a horrible fashion, that they find out this isn’t a game at all.
I don’t want to say this is just a complete knock-off of the Saw series, but really, it’s a knock-off of the Saw series. Solve a series of puzzles to thwart terribly gruesome traps and escape a changed person. The only difference is that the people that escape the traps aren’t changed in any way. Also, the game doesn’t want to play by its own rules so why have them in the first place? For example, the first couple that solves the puzzle is killed immediately by basically the trap they were trying to escape. They solved the puzzle and died. They weren’t even a piece of the larger plot to get the group there, or at least it didn’t seem that way.
I thought I had the entire plot figured out by about the first 15mins, but by the end, the movie had thrown all that build-up out the window as basically a red herring. The final ending I think was trying to preach a deeper meaning but the rest of the film hadn’t earned that “moral lesson” that it was trying to teach. It’s decently acted by some of the cast and some of the dialog is well done, but overall, it’s not worth it. There is another movie of the same name that came out in 2019. This one, however, you can skip without much worry of losing too much.
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