Watching Escape Room: A Movie Review

It’s hard to come by an actual scary horror movie and chilling mystery movie, yet Escape Room proved otherwise. In this drama/mystery, we watch a group of distinctive people enter what seems like a harmless escape room but turns out to be the game of their lives.

Just like any other escape room, the group has to use clues around them to leave the room, but the twist is that they do so in very uncomfortable, deadly situations. The movie keeps you at the edge of your seat since you do not know why these people have been targeted nor what they will do in such a pressured situation.

The movie was released on January 4th and on its opening weekend, ranked number two. In the three weeks it has been out in theaters, it has made a total of $47,765,149 domestically. This nowhere near compares to the $316,469,197 made by Aquaman, but then again, Aquaman was a much larger movie to produce.

As much as I liked it, it seems that critics did not enjoy it as much. As one NY Times writer said, “There are intimations of Final Destination, The Game, and other older, better films here, but Escape Room never catches a fire like any of those did.”

On Rotten Tomatoes it got 55%, a 49% on Metacritic, and 6.4/10 on IMDb. Among the audience there were mixed reviews. Some thought that it was interesting since the directors gave importance in developing each character, while others thought that the acting was terrible and the plot was too similar to other films. Harshvir Kaur, a junior who just recently watched the movie thought that, “it was exhilarating to watch and it kept me at the edge of my seat.  Can’t wait for the next one!”

In the end, if this is a genre that interests you, I definitely recommend you watch it. Maybe you will enjoy it like some…or think it is terrible like others.