The Surprise 2019 Horror Hit Escape Room Is a Saw Knockoff That Wastes a Moderately Promising Premise on Some Old Bullshit
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
At this stage in my life and career I should probably feel free to see whatever movie I’d like. I am something of a movie buff. I’ve been a professional film writer for twenty-six years and a cinephile all my life.
Yet because of the nature of my career I have a very hard time convincing myself to watch a movie that I am not professionally obligated to write about. That’s because, as a house husband and father of two who runs a website, writes a Substack newsletter, cohosts a podcast and is in the process of writing a 700 page book about the history of American films about the film industry time is a precious commodity I never have enough of.
So I devote what little time and energy I have to things that I have to do as opposed to what I’d like to do. That is an unnecessarily wordy way of saying that I really want to see the new Saw movie and I am mildly frustrated that it lost the Substack poll to determine which movie I must see and write about this weekend. True, I actively encouraged subscribers to vote for the new Paw Patrol movie so that I can see it with my son but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t actually much rather see the return of Jigsaw.
He’s Jigsaw! He says a lot of portentous shit! He tortures people! He makes a lot of crazy gizmos and doo-hickeys designed to split human bodies apart. What's not to love? I also pitched Fatherly on doing a piece that would require me to watch the whole series out of a combination of curiosity and masochism but they passed. A little too grisly and ghoulish for a parenting site.
So when I saw the 2019 sleeper hit Escape Room on a list of potential spooky season Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 possibilities I chose it because it seemed like a good way to get my Saw fix while still being able to check another Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 choice off my list.
I was not wrong. Escape Room is a lot like the Saw franchise. Both are about mysterious sadists who force strangers with dark, traumatic, dramatic backstories to engage in deadly, complicated and convoluted games with death as the inevitable punishment for failing.
The big difference is that the Saw movies are rated R so they can deliver the grisly violence horror buffs angrily demand while Escape Room is PG-13, ensuring that it will be softer than a baby’s bottom and no scarier than the average episode of Sesame Street or Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.
As readers of this column are well aware, PG-13 horror movies are a pet peeve of mine. They really grind my gears and chap my hide. You can’t do a proper torture porn movie with a PG-13 rating. The best you can manage is torture softcore porn.
I was bummed that Escape Room was PG-13 but excited that it takes place in my old home town of Chicago, which I love seeing represented in movies and television. Unfortunately, as its title subtly suggests, Escape Room takes place in an escape room.
While the titular escape room is in Chicago, it is, unfortunately, not Chicago-themed. So there are not rooms devoted to Lou Malnati’s, Wrigley Field, The Signature Room (can you believe that it’s going out of business?), Comiskey Park and a used car lot on the South Side.
The challenges are non Chicago-centric either. At no point are the contestants forced to eat Italian Beef sandwiches, hot dogs (without relish!) or deep dish pizza until their stomachs explode.
In Escape Room six strangers with dramatic backstories are invited to an Escape Room that promises a rather paltry ten thousand dollar prize for the winner. The unlucky contestants are Zoey Davis (Taylor Russell), a brilliant African-American college student, Jason Walker (Jay Ellis), a cocky African-American businessman, blue collar worker Ben Miller (Logan Miller), Indian-American escape room super-fan Danny Khan (Nik Dodani, the gay family friend from Dear Evan Hansen), Amanda Harper (Deborah Ann Woll), an Iraq War veteran and finally burly trucker Mike Nolan (Tyler Labine).
In a pre-woke era Escape Room's cast would have consisted of five guys who look and act exactly like me and a gorgeous 19 year old with massive breasts whose tiny top keeps falling off. This would be explained narratively and through dialogue by having the busty teenager say things like, “Oh no! There was a stiff wind that blew off my skimpy undershirt! Now everyone can see my sizable bosoms! I’m so embarrassed!”
In a post-woke world, however, patriotic Americans like myself are subjected to the cultural plague of diversity every time we watch a new movie, which is a form of white genocide.
The first room has heating coils that get hotter and hotter until they threaten to kill everyone. It’s the first of a set of seemingly impossible challenges that the gang figures out because there would be no movie if they all died fifteen minutes in.
They then go from extreme heat to freezing cold when they find themselves seemingly outside in a frozen pond. Is it all a matter of AI or brilliant engineering or have the players entered a supernatural realm beyond their imaginations? Are they in hell or are their minds playing tricks on them?
I had plenty of time to ponder questions like that because I was thoroughly un-engaged by the film itself. The PG-13 rating certainly doesn’t help but Escape Room barely even attempts to be scary.
The group begins losing members and the corpses start piling up. This escape room is unlike any other in that it’s deadly for all but the most ingenious players. A series of escape rooms follow that all correspond to the past trauma that brought them to the attention of the sociopaths behind the escape room of death.
Protagonists with dark, violent, traumatic pasts are a groaning cliche in movies like these. It's another thing Escape Room has in common with the Saw movies but rather than being punished for transgressions great and small the gamers here were all the sole survivors of tragic accidents.
But who is behind the game? And what is its purpose? Stop reading if you don’t want this stupid movie spoiled but the answers are as anti-climactic and underwhelming as everything else.
In a deeply uninteresting development, it turns out that rich sadists pay the people behind the escape rooms money so that they can bet on who will win and also delight in the suffering and deaths of people less wealthy than themselves.
Escape Room ends with a whimper rather than a bang but it nevertheless has the chutzpah to close by teasing a sequel promising more of the same. Escape Room grossed an impressive one hundred and fifty nine million dollars so in 2021 we were blessed with Escape Room: Tournament of Champions.
I’ve learned my lesson, however, and will not see this dumb movie’s dumb sequel.
Unless someone pays me to, of course.
Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, my next book, a massive, 650 page exploration of the long and distinguished history of American movies about the film industry at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Check out The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity 3: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 50) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!
I’ve also written multiple versions of my many books about “Weird Al” Yankovic that you can buy here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that?
Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/
And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace