Thoughts on Escape Room (SPOILERS)

I just watched the movie a couple nights ago. The only reason I wanted to see it was for Deborah Ann Woll, who plays Amanda, because I’m a True Blood fan, and liked the Jessica Hamby character she played on that show. But I’ve put off watching it because it seemed like a PG-13 Saw ripoff. That being said, having finally watched it, I have to say I probably would have actually preferred if this film was retooled to be a Saw reboot.

While not good, personally, Escape Room was a lot better than what Jigsaw (2017) showed us. I liked that the characters, for the most part, worked together to survive rather than just be total pieces of shit to one another that occurs in most of the Saw sequels. The Billiards room sequence is probably my favorite sequence in the movie. My favorite characters would probably be Mike and Amanda. I kind of liked Jason as well, even though he was a prick.

Honestly, everything before the last ten minutes or so was decent or okay with me for the most part. The only thing I didn’t like was the pre-title sequence. It just killed the tension for me when I knew Ben was going to be one of the last, if not, the last player in the game. The moment the film catches up to the pre-title sequence, finding out Zoe is alive, and the reveal of what exactly is going on kind of undid everything I enjoyed about the film previously.

I kind of find it hard to believe that the company didn’t think to have decoy cameras, so that if someone like Zoe tried to outsmart them by breaking the cameras, they could put a stop to her before she makes a move. Considering the gigantic crew the company would need to have in order to completely vacate the entire building by the end, you would think there would be more guards on standby to check to see if anyone tries to cheat the system like she did.

I also don’t understand the purpose of having someone survive the final room like Ben did if he was just going to be killed anyway. Why even bother explaining anything to him? Less talk, and focus on eliminating the survivors. The company comes across as smug, and appear to be less competent than Jigsaw when a 20 year old college student hands their ass to them like it’s nothing. It’s a tired trope of villains in movies when they do this, and I’m over it.

Also, the fact that the company even managed to vacate the premises entirely within the span of what appears to be a few hours after Zoe and Ben escaped is bullshit. The epilogue six months later is completely unnecessary and is nothing but sequel baiting. If the company had enough resources to fake the deaths of the others, I doubt they don’t have the resources to track Ben and Zoe down and kill them. Why put them back in another escape room?

And lastly, the fact that the company wants to turn a plane into an escape room for the two survivors is also ridiculous. It’s bad enough your company endangers the lives of select individuals to appease what I’m assuming is the 1%, the rich and greedy who watches these escape rooms. Now you want to cause an act of domestic terrorism by hijacking a plane, to potentially eliminate a couple of college-aged young adults who somehow outsmarted you.

Save for the ending, and some logistics of the building having the entire billiards room being able to elevate up and down, hold the amount of water they had to have a legit ice fishing pond, the rest of the movie prior to the ending is fine and decent. It’s probably something I would put on in the background while doing other things, and then I would just skip the ending. It’s not for me, but clearly it has its audience who are anticipating the sequel.

I am left with several questions about the people who sent our characters the puzzle boxes that invited them to the escape room, especially Ben’s boss, Jason’s client, and Zoe’s professor. Did the company pay them off to deliver the puzzle boxes to these characters, or did the company just send it to them themselves with someone else’s name and address attached to it? Is Jason’s client a member of company who watches the games as they unfold?

And if those people weren’t involved, couldn’t Ben and Zoe trace the packages’ shipping back to whoever sent it to them? Or did the company sweep their places and got rid of any evidence of the packages’ existence? Because if the company did that, I still have to ask if they know where they live, why don’t they just track them down and kill them? Why bother going through the trouble of setting up another escape room for them if they could possibly escape again?