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Escape Room Reviews

... A film whose only idea to convey is the need to escape from the movie theater. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Aug 19, 2024

If cool concepts alone made for good films then I’d be writing a very different review for Escape Room.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 14, 2024

Escape Room is a fun ride, even with inadequate dialogue. Quite a bit of it consists of characters simply pointing out items as they enter the various rooms. It’s very possible, though, to overlook this because of the rollicking journey that follows.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 25, 2023

Escape Room holds frightening puzzles and balanced tension, even in its weaker moments.

Full Review | May 13, 2023

The overall plot wasn’t quite clear at times and within the first 20 minutes of the film, the characters were already in the first escape room

Full Review | Jan 22, 2023

You learn early on to switch your brain off, but even that can’t cover the ludicrous finale.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 20, 2022

Escape Room is better than most that come out of the January film scrap heap, as long as you give yourself over to a contrived plot that is only worth the price of admission if you are fine with whodunit clichés.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 19, 2022

The movie never involves the viewer in the puzzle or riddle-solving process. The characters rush from clue to clue, and we just watch as they figure it out. It's a passive experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 4, 2022

A solid premise and some legitimately thrilling set pieces help to counteract a mixed bag of characters, several of whom are actively deplorable. The film needed more Deborah Ann Woll

Full Review | Jul 17, 2021

It's a shocking thing to witness a movie like this do just fine for so long, only to completely collapse right at the finish line.

Full Review | Original Score: 2. 5 / 5 | Jun 25, 2021

Escape Room largely makes the most of this concept with a fun if not overly bloody effort.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Aug 30, 2020

Manages to make the most of its killer concept and benefits from set pieces that have clearly been thought out in the best possible way.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 16, 2020

[W]hile the overall pastiche has a certain charm for a while, it only lasts so long.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 26, 2020

There's so much quality content out there and so little spare time to enjoy it. Escape Room made me wish I had stayed home and taken a nap instead.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2020

Escape Room is in no way a great movie, but it does certainly qualify as a solid effort, and I say that as someone who is rarely forgiving of lazy or idiotic horror efforts.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 14, 2020

It doesn't go far enough with the ludicrous nature of the story.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 8, 2020

Escape Room is exactly the movie I expected, as it ticks all the requisite boxes for a January horror film. Its biggest sin is that it really could have been so much more.

Full Review | Mar 18, 2020

The cast projects a generic, 50s B-movie vibe, but in a good way; no one character is especially likable or unlikable, and this keeps you guessing as to whom the filmmakers will kill off.

Full Review | Feb 19, 2020

It's little more than a less dreary reincarnation of the Saw formula, but Escape Room does it with enough skill and production value that it makes for a fun, quick-paced diversion...

Full Review | Original Score: 3.2/5 | Jan 31, 2020

...It had enough interesting ideas and an underlying commentary on classism to help it stay afloat, but it was ultimately too forgettable to leave an impact.

Full Review | Original Score: 5.5/10 | Jan 17, 2020

Cast & crew

User reviews

Escape Room

A fun little thriller..

rustonreviews
Feb 8, 2019

Falls apart at the end

CronenbergsMonster
Aug 11, 2020
Feb 7, 2020

A lot better than I expected

misanthr0pist
Feb 21, 2021

Cube did it better, but still fun!

Jan 5, 2019

Solid Watch .. until the ending

deniz_yazici
Apr 8, 2019

Decent enough

jhmoondance
Oct 28, 2021

To my surprise, I enjoyed this movie!

valtierraitza

For what it is, it isn't bad

Jan 2, 2019

Adequate thriller, nothing more

Leofwine_draca
Feb 2, 2020

The love child of Saw and Cube - which means I love it!

Jan 6, 2019

Pretty cool

Nov 2, 2021

It's scary that some people are giving this 10/10

thailerrhyne
Jan 12, 2019
shvmbanerjee
May 27, 2019

Not a 10, not a 1 - but I was entertained!

kenleongrmt
Aug 28, 2021

A disaster of an ending

dynamiteheaddy-43387
Jan 31, 2019
lukehasenfus
Jan 3, 2019

A clever cross between Saw and Belko Experiment

alesjonestrader
quisha-01195
Feb 10, 2022

room designs

SnoopyStyle
Sep 2, 2019

Fun escape movie

Netscape_Navigator
Oct 24, 2021

Not boring but entertaining and that's all that matters.

HotDoggyBoomBooM
Sep 22, 2021

Cool concept, terrible execution

Oct 1, 2022

It's more of a 6.5/10 film

danielmanson
Dec 28, 2020

Your Everyday Time Passing Thriller

TRIDENT1745
Dec 23, 2021

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Film Review: ‘Escape Room’

The world is rigged in a life-is-a-game thriller (think "Saw" meets "The Game") that offers a scattering of preposterous diversion, until it doesn't.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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In one of the more effectively preposterous death-trap suspense scenes of “ Escape Room ,” half a dozen terrified strangers, who have signed on to compete in a game of experiential survival, find themselves in an oversize bar that looks like it might, under different circumstances, be a fun place to hang out. It’s a couple of stories tall, with a pool table, a sprawling bar, and an oversize jukebox. Except that the entire room is turned upside down. As Petula Clark’s “Downtown” plays with wavery slurred speed on the jukebox, pieces of the floor begin to drop away, revealing what looks like an elevator shaft to hell. One of the people ends up dangling over the abyss from a thinly stretched phone cord, at which point you may stop breathing for a second. But only for a second.

Can our heroes figure out the clue — it’s got something to do with a lost billiard ball — that will let them exit the room and move on to the next trip-wired chamber of horror? “Escape Room,” directed by Adam Robitel (“Insidious: The Last Key”), is one of those movies, like “Game Night” or any of the “Saw” films, in which the world we’re watching is entirely rigged. The genre was probably invented 40 years ago, when Ira Levin wrote “Deathtrap” (or maybe eight years before that, when Anthony Shaffer wrote “Sleuth”), but it got kicked into the age of head-trip technology with David Fincher’s “The Game” (1997), in which the ever-shifting reality that surrounded the Michael Douglas character reflected the prospect of life being hijacked by the morph-happy consciousness of video games. The “Saw” series added its own layer of booby-trapped grunge torture: Jigsaw, the harlequin puppet, may have been a vengeful sadist, but he was really the serial killer as God, devising Rube Goldberg contraptions of death to toy with you.

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“Escape Room,” which is like “Saw” remade as a PG-13 group date, jettisons the torture but keeps the death. It’s a game of survival of the fittest in which the planners of the game are several steps ahead of the characters, and the film works hard to stay steps ahead of the audience, but only by basically making itself up as it goes along.

Popular on Variety

The contestants, who have to escape a linked series of rooms, have signed on to win a possible prize of $10,000. They think their job is to look for keys, hidden compartments, and cryptic word clues, and it is. But they don’t realize that the stakes of the game are real —i.e., their lives are truly on the line — until they gather in the first chamber, which looks like an elegant waiting room, only to discover that it’s a giant oven that’s about to bake them. From there, they stumble through a vent and out into a picturesque wintry wilderness, where it’s only a matter of time before the vast stretch of ice before them starts to crack and give way.

The characterizations in a movie like this one tend to take a back seat to the churnings of the plot, and in “Escape Room” that’s even more true than usual; that’s what makes it a January movie (though this one could carve out a week or two of modest business). Everyone on screen is playing a Johnny (or Jane) One-Note: Logan Miller as the mouthy slacker millennial, Deborah Ann Woll as the scarred Iraq War veteran, Tyler Labine as the trucker with a proletarian chip on his shoulder, Jay Ellis as the heartless dandy of a financial player, and Taylor Russell as the wallflower who’s like the virtuous quiet girl in a slasher firm. Nik Dodani, in giant glasses, plays the one character who’s game for all the games — a junior veteran gamer who, no matter how treacherous things get, thinks it’s all just for fun. I wish the film had done more with him.

Even when these movies are good, they’re pure carny contraptions. But next to the unevenly diverting trap-door convolutions of “Escape Room,” something like “Deathtrap” begins to look like Chekhov. The first part of the film gets some airy momentum going. Then, however, we learn the secret of what the characters have in common, and it gives you that slightly sinking feeling of one contrivance too many. Who gives a damn if they live or die? Certainly not the movie, and so, following suit, not the audience, either.

Reviewed at Sony Screening Room, New York, Jan. 2, 2019. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 100 MIN.

Production: A Sony Pictures Releasing release of a Columbia Pictures, Original Film production. Producers: Neal H. Moritz, Ori Marmur. Executive producer: Rebecca Rivo.
Crew: Director: Adam Robitel. Screenplay: Bragi F. Schut, Maria Melnik. Camera (color, widescreen): Marc Spicer. Editor: Steve Mirkovich. Music: Brian Tyler, John Carey.
With: Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Tyler Labine, Jay Ellis, Nik Dodani, Adam Robitel, Kenneth Fok, Yorick van Wageningen.

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In the middle section of Escape Room , I was surprised at how much fun I was having. One would think that watching fictional characters solve puzzles wouldn’t be too enjoyable, but Adam Robitel ’s thriller is fleet-footed with distinct characters in a unique situation. In its best moments, Escape Room feels like a PG-13 mashup of Cube and Saw without the need to rely on gore to get the audience excited. But as the game wears on and the larger picture becomes clear, Escape Room becomes trapped by conventions and a need to copy other movies rather than invoking them. In its desperation to become A FRANCHISE, Escape Room loses sight of its greatest strengths.

Zoey ( Taylor Russell ), Jason ( Jay Ellis ), Ben ( Logan Miller ), Amanda ( Deborah Ann Woll ), Mike ( Tyler Labine ), and Danny ( Nik Dodani ) are strangers all having issues in their personal lives, but all end up getting invited to an Escape Room. Danny, the Escape Room aficionado, explains the concept to the others (and those unfamiliar in the audience)—you have to solve clues to find a way out of the room. The twist here, as the players discover, is that the rooms are deadly and that someone has played a very long game to get these six specific people fighting for their lives. Realizing that this isn’t the tame recreational experience they’d been lured to believe, the players must find a way out of the escape room to survive.

Although it has a bit of a slow start, once the game begins, Robitel is adept at slowly ratcheting up the tension as the players try to escape various rooms before these rooms kill them with traps and tricks. What should feel hackneyed and forced eventually finds an alluring rhythm so that we feel we’re playing right alongside the main characters. It’s not so much that we’re able to solve the room ahead of them, but rather we feel the pressure of the ticking clock and the sadistic stakes. However, because of its PG-13 rating, Escape Room can’t rely on gore or violence. Rather than being adrift without these fallbacks, Robitel rises to the occasion to make a solid date night movie for teenagers.

However, the script can’t sustain the premise as the story wears on. The rooms feel less creative and the larger reveals come off as derivative. Escape Room has chances to blaze its own trail and find ways to surprise the audience without being overly grim (a tone that doesn’t really fit with the PG-13 rating). Instead, the plot starts to bend over backwards to try and copy Saw and The Game , losing its own personality in the process. Those films ultimately rest on sadism and conspiracy, respectively, and for a large chunk of its runtime, Escape Room is about collaboration and solving puzzles. It may not be much, but it’s more entertaining than expected and feels like something fresh rather than a tame hodgepodge of other movies.

Escape Room clearly has its eye on becoming a series, and that’s a shame because the least interesting thing about it as any overarching story that would connect sequels and prequels. Where this film shines is in gathering six characters from different backgrounds, and then forcing them into a survival situation without the sadism or the cruelty a hard-R horror film might inflict. When it tries to be its own thing, Escape Room is remarkably liberating and exciting. When it tries to be other franchises, it’s trapped.

Tyler Labine