Though I haven't seen Vincenzo Natali's 1997 film,
Cube, I have seen about thirty-two
Saw movies and, in all honesty, could take or leave a PG-13 version of those movies that decided to utilize that same premise while also capitalizing on the recent fad of going with your friends to an "escape room" and seeing if you can figure out the clues in enough time to, well...escape. It's a nice little riff writer/director Adam Robitel (
Insidious: The Last Key) has come up with, sure, but he's essentially re-contextualized that aforementioned Natali picture for modern audiences as the synopsis for
Cube is surprisingly accurate for Robitel's
Escape Room. "Six complete strangers of widely varying personality types are involuntarily placed in an endless maze containing deadly traps." Change that "involuntarily" to "voluntarily" and you have yourself a whole new movie. Despite the glaring similarities between itself and a number of other subgenre peers though,
Escape Room still manages to make itself feel fresh in ways that emphasize the journey rather than leave it all up to the destination.
Escape Room doesn't necessarily improve upon any of these well-worn tropes, but it isn't a completely wasteful take on the premise either; it doesn't re-invent the wheel, but it re-designs it to the extent a wheel can be re-designed. Video review
here. Full review
here.
C
Honestly expected more from director Karyn Kusama after
The Invitation, but while
Destroyer is still a very well put-together genre film it does little to exceed the boundaries of its given genre-even with a fully committed and totally de-glamorized Nicole Kidman performance. The structure tries to do something interesting with the crime thriller tropes as well, but even that twist feels somewhat rote at this point. Still, it’s not not entertaining and I was just invested enough to care about where the story took our main character.
C+
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