The year is 2017, and the market is flooded with movies called Escape Room. Half of them are on Tubi and Freevee, but I think I saw the one with the highest budget.

Escape Room is low-hanging fruit. You have these weird warehouses where you have to do math problems and solve riddles to get out of some guy’s studio space. It was only a matter of time before the horror genre added spinning blades of death and crushing walls.

Join Amanda, Zoey, Ben, Mike, Jason, and Danny as they enter a billionaire’s concrete warehouse to solve escape room puzzles for a chance to win $10,000. Right off the bat, the $10,000 prize is weak compared to Squid Games and The Hunger Games, but that is typical of eccentric billionaires. They are always so stingy with the trickle-down economics. But like Gen Z, they jump at the chance to finally receive a 5-digit sum of money. Jason, the Wall Street broker, should have made his lackey attend this. It’s called delegation skills.

The team chemistry is also indicative of Gen Z. Everyone thinks they are part of a YouTube channel and wastes no time roasting each other or contaminating the comments. The script was written for a rage bait video.

Questions emerge as the major villain can set up these gigantic deathtraps without a single OSHA violation. At least the heating and cooling bill should drive the company into bankruptcy. Is the blueprint in the town hall records?

Out of the get-go, rooms start setting fire, turning frozen, spraying gas, crushing walls, picking off each victim. Zoey, who is good at math and is always the person you delegate 99.8% of the problems in an escape room to, starts to unravel the Billionaire’s plan. His name is an anagram of Yutan Woo, but they fail to mention his electric car company, which he operates on the side, when he isn’t investing in political parties.

This movie gets the job done, and I can’t say the same about all the Asylum knockoffs. It has puzzles, and it feels like Goosebumps made an entry into the Saw series.

6/10 Stars for Escape Room

Features: a few F and S bombs, claustrophobia, survivor PTSD, burning alive, falling to your death, bullying and teasing, poisonous drugs, and hypothermia