Escape Room is an interesting concept which i think quite obviously is based on the idea of being trapped in an escape room and you die if you can't get out.
So a group of rather annoying people who don't know eachother are thrust together in a room for what they believe is an escape room challenge of some sort with a prize of 10,000 dollars offered to the winner. After staying in the room for a long period of time they start to realize that no one is actually coming to retrieve them. When one person tries to leave and the door knob falls off they realize that the game has already begun and they are already in the escape room.
They quickly realize that this is no ordinary escape room as the various pitfalls that exist can actually hurt or kill the people involved. There are also several escape rooms, one after the other, and they are all extremely elaborate and of course deadly.
The film is entertaining but since the characters are all meant to be working together to a certain degree there is an awful lot of argumentative dialogue, some of which is repetitive and dumb like "What is this place?" and "what do we do now?" as if some of the other people got there first and know the answer to these things.
It reminds me a lot of Saw, like I mentioned in the title, but there is no gore... for me that was a big part of the allure of the Saw films, but I can understand how some people might be pleased for that to not be a part of the movie. Overall, i would say that this movie was decent, but the argumentative dialogue nearly pushed me into switching it off.
I suppose it is a good 90 minutes for somewhat mindless entertainment. For the most part it isn't a film that makes you think because the clues in the rooms are either extremely obvious, or something we can't figure out faster than the characters because we are not shown the clues at the start - we have to wait for them to find them and then, at times, it seems a bit dumb.
The film was a tremendous financial success, managing to pull in over $150 million on a B-movie budget of $9 million. So I suppose we all better get to movies based on this sort of thing and of course the sequel that is set up at the end of this one, because there are going to be a lot more of these.... bank on it.
On a scale of "Urgh!" to "wowsers" I give Escape Room the overall score of.....
