No Escape Room (2018)

Directed by Alex Merkin [Other horror films: Across the Hall (2009), House of the Witch (2017)]

For a modern-day Syfy original, this was a pretty interesting and decent movie. Unfortunately, it’s held back by a few things, but it’s still overall an okay popcorn flick.

It felt almost like a combination of Cube 2: Hypercube and Saw, with Cube’s influences coming in more toward the end. The film certainly had a solid atmosphere, albeit it there were more than a few things that didn’t really seem to make sense.

Young Jeni Ross did a fine job in the movie, and her character was decently likable herself. Her father, played by Mark Ghanimé, was fun also, and probably had one of the better performances in the film. The father/estranged daughter dynamic really helped ratchet the suspense up, and you couldn’t help but hope for a happy ending.

As it was, the ending wasn’t that great. In fact, it barely felt a competent conclusion. Instead of explaining anything, some characters discover that their horrors aren’t quite over as previously thought (those horrors not having been explained at all), and boom, the end. I was hoping for some kind of explanation to the situation they encountered, and a much better ending that, you know, actually felt like an ending. It’s a shame they couldn’t manage that, as the movie had a lot of potential beforehand.

Those are pretty big flaws, and definitely brought down my rating more than a little. I still think the concept and execution is decently cool, but without any type of explanation to tie everything together, the audience is left in the dark as to what was really going on. The father-daughter dynamics worked well, and those performances sort of help counterbalance the lack of a solid conclusion, but the movie would have been so much better had they buckled in and forced out a better ending.

Still, the story was interesting, and there were some creepy scenes and occasional gore. For a Syfy original, I’d say this did pretty well, but it’ll likely end up as little more than forgettable when all is said and done.

7/10