A Room of boring horrors
Escape Room (M, 100 mins) Directed by Adam Robitel Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★
Around 20 years ago, I made the trip three times to the mostly unlamented Rialto in Wellington, to sit on its excruciating plastic seats in front of a minimal screen and watch a film called Cube.
Strewth it was good. Cube was a low-budget thriller, starring a cast of unknowns as a group of disparate strangers who have woken up in a maze of mostly identical white rooms.
Some of the rooms offer safe passage to the next but others contain outstandingly inventive death traps. The cast are sporadically sliced, diced, julienned and flambed until only one is left standing, staring out a door at nothing we could see. Cube
was inventive, lean and quite brilliant.
So imagine my surprise today, turning up to Escape Room to see a film that, despite having a decent budget and actors to play with, manages to be nothing but a flabby and unforgiveably boring retelling of that exact same plot with a bit more interior design and a dash of Saw and Final Destination thrown in.
Director Adam Robitel (Insidious: The Last Key)
mistakenly tries to make the storyline somehow explicable. As if we go to any film in the strangersdie-in-horrible-fashion genre wanting to be absorbed in plot and character?
Films from Cube to Groundhog Day have proved that if your story makes no sense, then you’re best off just ripping into it and hoping noone asks any hard questions.
The 20 minutes that Robitel spends introducing his cast and their backgrounds is 20 minutes wasted. As one legendary Kiwi film editor is fond of saying, ‘‘if you want your film to finish fast, you’ve got to kick it in the guts up the front’’.
There’s nothing wrong with any of the performances, – Taylor Russell (Lost in Space) is the standout, though – but Escape Room is flattering itself if it thinks we really care.
These films work a treat when they are nasty, brutish, short and utterly aware of their own stupidities. Escape Room, despite some impressive design and a few decent visual flourishes, ticks none of the boxes. And now I’m wondering whether Wellington’s Aro St Video still has a copy of Cube.