Let us begin. First, this was a bit of a milestone since this was the first time, alongside The Legend of Baron in March, I have been able to attend cinema style showing of a film after a very long time. So perhaps, and this is all still very speculative, I did have some subconscious expectations that were a touch higher than is appropriate. Even with that in mind, I would have had to say a hesitant maybe on whether I made a good choice with my first film in a while. The answer to that would be a rather emphatic no.
As a starting point, we have Cole (Keegan Allen) who is a streamer and influencer, who goes live and gets tens of thousands of viewers. He is solely focused on filming extreme situations in order to post on social media. To further this story, one of his friend and fellow streamer Dash (George Janko) tells him about this super exclusive escape room owned by this rich Russian man, Alexei (Ronen Rubinstein) which makes him extremely excited. Fast forward a couple of months, and Cole, Dash, Cole’s girlfriend Erin (Holland Roden), and their friends Thomas (Denzel Whitaker) and Maya (Tia Valentine) are on a first class flight to Russia. Everyone is oblivious to what lies ahead.
Now I will be elaborating on the elements of the movie I found to be sensible and even favorable construction wise. Firstly, the lighting within the darker settings felt pleasant. Secondly, the overlay they utilized to showcase the stream perspective looked quite real. Lastly, booming in the dance club as well as the unique comments showcased was remarkable too. When it comes to the comments shown on screen, follower-to-comment was simply brilliant. And the number of emojis used to the text wrote was great. But take into account this film as well as the commentary made is primarily in Russian. Hence, providing the audience with zero subtitles. Having viewers be uncertain of what will be showcased next added an intensity to the film. It certainly encourages future watchers to contemplate how much more exciting the film with captions will be. Almost as if the captors enable the audience to see what the captions state in front of them.
Due to the layout of the film, it is challenging to sharpen the pencils without giving away the film’s secret.
In the following paragraph, we will provide an overall perspective of the film. Further on, we will give a detailed review and analysis of the film’s ending.
One of the film’s strongest problems lies in its characters. Without some attachment to one of the characters, this movie might prove to be very disappointing. Take for instance Cole, I did not care for his need to always get that #Content. His entire character can be summed up in the fact that after his girlfriend was nearly abducted by some thugs, he instead started worrying about whether or not there was any footage of the incident. Or Dash. His character is every bit as terrible as Cole and the rest of the characters in the rest of the film are so underdeveloped, it’s a case of why even bother. So, I found the rest of the movie quite boring, I expected it to be tense, but because of the total lack of character relatability, it wasn’t as thrilling and the movie aspired it to be. I will say that a few times this were antagonistic and threatening moments, they cut out all the music and sound, I guess for these moments. This might have worked better if the absence of sound did not mean that the entire audience had to endure the soundtrack to The Greatest Showman blasting from the adjacent theater.
Had I been invested in the movie, that would have gotten on my nerves, but it was somewhere between funny and entertaining. You can also repeatedly state that you are using Die Hard as a reference point (just like Now You See Me and others) but again, that does not excuse the copying of Die Hard.
The film has us gearing towards the end, and this is where the really juicy spoilers begin. The filmmakers made the film hoping for a lot of gasps during the reveals, but if the people in my cinema are any guide, I was expecting a lot more sighs. The shock at the end clears itself in a sense, because we don’t ever see anything from Cole’s lens. Cole is strung along in such a way that the audience already understands that there’s a single endpoint to the film. For me the moment, he first returns to the escape room in the escape room, I had pretty much ascertained that it was all ultimately going to end and be confirmed inside the elevator. The voyeuristic and abusive content of this film still feels like a waste of time and it somewhat creeps me put that Cole would love to witness it all unfold.
It was even more baffling to know that everybody was in the same group of wrongdoers, and that is why I do not trust what was portrayed. It also does not check out as we see them plotting it on the Internet in the end credits and anyone who has set foot in a Twitch stream knows that noobs would have been trying to get him to rage in the comments from the second he stepped on that plane. That means they all were okay with him being a racist and wanting to kill off all the people of color first so that he could survive which well… yikes? The most intriguing part of this film was when I was exiting the cinema pondering on who in that scenario would be accused of murder?
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