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. 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. 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). 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. 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. They think their job is to look for keys, hidden compartments, and cryptic word clues, and it is. The contestants, who have to escape a linked series of rooms, have signed on to win a possible prize of $10,000. 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. “Escape Room,” which is like “Saw” remade as a PG-13 group date, jettisons the torture but keeps the death. 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. 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. Escape Room (2019) Director: Adam Robitel Six adventurous strangers (Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Tyler Labine, Jay Ellis and Nik Dodani) travel to a mysterious building to experience the escape room - a game where players compete to solve a series of puzzles to win 10,000. 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.
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