Escape Room (2019) Review

I'm going to see Escape Room: Tournament of Champions tonight, so I thought I better watch the first film in the franchise Escape Room and here is my review for it. The premise of the film sees six strangers trapped in different escape rooms looking for a way to survive. 

Main Character

Taylor Russell plays Zoe who is our main character here and she is just fine in the role, for a young actress she has some decent moments but unfortunately her performance falls down because her character is so generic and boring. She is basically this incredibly intelligent girl who has the answer to everything and it makes it a bit annoying at times. There is so little explained about her as a character that it makes it tough to care despite an actress really trying to make you care which is a shame. 

Supporting Characters 

The rest of the cast fall down with this too, the actors are trying their best to give good performances but are let down by poor writing and poor characterisation. I mean Deborah Ann Woll from Daredevil is here and does a decent enough job, the rest of the cast are also okay. But we have the arrogant businessman, the PTSD army vet and the drugged up youth. It was like they just didn't want to bother creating interesting characters because that was too much effort. 

Story 

The story is where the film really falls down. The overall idea of a horror film in an escape room is a pretty decent idea, the issue is that a franchise like Saw exists and this idea has been done before plenty of times. It could have worked, but the characters aren't interesting and there is minimal time spent getting you to care about them in any way with a frustrating cliff-hanger ending that the film did not earn. 

Script

The script is also bad, the dialogue is cliché and the overall writing for the story is just badly handled. The writing mixed with poor character development is the biggest hinderance for the film. 

Style 

The film actually has some pretty interesting escape rooms that deal with different types of challenges for the group of people to go at, the film is also paced pretty well, I never got bored and think the film was dragging. But I think the issue is that this film is a bit tame and by the end I feel like I have barely learnt anything about the overall plot. I hate to make the comparisons to Saw but the traps in those films are way more inventive and brutal then what we see here. 

Overall

Overall, Escape Room is a poor film. It doesn't do enough for horror fans to sink their teeth into and it doesn't do anything to convince others to watch so this is one you can skip. 

Rating - 3/10