PLOT: A popular influencer travels to Russia with his entourage to partake in an intense and secretive game room that may have dangerous consequences. Is there anything more suspicious sounding than a mysterious Russian game room? I think not!
LOWDOWN: NO ESCAPE (OWN IT HERE – WATCH IT HERE) is a type of horror/ thriller specifically tailored towards Millennials. I'm not knocking that either as I believe the genre is ever-changing. With technology becoming almost another utility in life, I'm interested in seeing how social media seeps into horror more predominately. BLACK MIRROR (which set farther in the future), SPREE, and UNFRIENDED all take a stab at this specific sub-genre (if you can even call it that).
NO ESCAPE (previously known as FOLLOW ME) is the first that I've seen that tackles the specific Youtube personality known as the "douchetuber." If that word is foreign to you, it's specific to the type of You Tuber who's "someone with no soul, no morals, no creativity, and no entertainment," Basically, Jake Paul and anyone like him. Tackling the national dilemma of toxic YouTube personalities mixed with HOSTEL's grittiness and SAW's deathtraps, how does NO ESCAPE hold up? Beware of mild spoilers ahead.
Cole (Keegan Allen) is being whisked away to Russia for a memorable experience celebrating his YouTube channel hitting its tenth anniversary. As his friends have set it up, Cole doesn't know much; his only plan is to obnoxiously live stream it to his worldwide fanbase. With this plot in mind, the movie starts on the plane heading north, and it is here that we get the vibe and personality snippets of our group of spunky friends. I'll give it to Keegan Allen, Denzel Whitaker, and Holland Roden for doing the most with clearly very little in terms of character growth. But good acting can't save one-dimensional characters that seem only to do two things, yell and take selfies a lot. Now, I had assumed that everyone was annoying because this would be like a throwback retro experience where we would be quickly introduced to a few useless teens to jump right into their unique and violent death; this ISN'T that.
I was wrong, and I'll admit it even if that's what the trailer hints at. NO ESCAPE wants you to care about the characters (my bad). Besides a hint of a more normal and grounded "Cole" outside his online personality, everyone is so f*cking annoying that by the time they are in actual danger, you've already wanted them dead five minutes into the movie. I don't blame any of the actors because it's clear they are supposed to be a comical, exaggerated version of a Millenial. The issue is then, why would I (or anyone) want them to live? This is where things get tricky because it isn't about picking off unlikeable characters, no. It's about surviving a mob kidnapping in a foreign country where you don't speak the language.
NO ESCAPE does not get into any gruesome deaths or unique traps like it advertises, as it is more of David Fincher's THE GAME (with a light sprinkle HOSTEL) than anything else. I can get behind that story-wise, but to keep things… surprising? We get a lot of nonsense with traps and captures that go nowhere and are only added to pad the runtime. A classic case of trying to "have your cake and eat it too," NO ESCAPE wants to be three separate movies without fully committing to one. That isn't to say this doesn't have its moments, the escape room is straight out of SAW, and though it means very little, I found myself a bit tense as Cole (under a time constraint) tries to figure out the multitude of puzzles to "save" his friends.
There are some bright spots here. Director Will Wernick does excellent work with the camera and knows how to cover a scene. I understood the spacial geography, and though a lot of this takes place in dark cellar types of environments, there's enough variety to give this its own look. I'm impressed at how gritty, and dank everything felt, which is impressive because it's clear that this was done on the cheap. Never once did I feel the budget, and that is impressive in itself. Wernick wisely puts the money where it counts, and because of this, the sets (mostly) feel authentic and look the part. I think with a tighter script or just a more straightforward and focused story, NO ESCAPE would have overcome a lot of its issues, but this doesn't know what it wants to be, and on top of that, it's populated with unlikable Millenials. I know they are the brunt of a lot of things, but NO ESCAPE isn't helping.
GORE: Besides a decent throat slit and a few headshots, NO ESCAPE is pretty tame when it comes to the red stuff. I would have liked more blood but in the end, this isn't a very gory movie.
BOTTOM LINE: NO ESCAPE just didn't work. It's possible that others will like a Youtuber as a protagonist, but for my money, this ain't for me. Maybe I've aged out of the type of story they are trying to tell? The target audience may be kids in their early twenties, and I'm just not that, no, I'm in that "other" age bracket; that's the type of sh*t that haunts me. What if… I'm now the grumpy guy nearing his forties that gets annoyed by these types of movies? Regardless, likable charters are a must if you don't plan on plowing through them in fun and gruesome ways. NO ESCAPE wants to be a serious horror film, yet it stumbles out of the gate with obnoxious twenty-somethings you'd hope would fail and move back into their parent's basement. Wernick has the talent for a long, fruitful career, but NO ESCAPE fails more than it works. It has its moments, but that's not enough to salvage the rest.
You can catch NO ESCAPE (HERE) on VOD, Friday, September 18th, 2020.
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