Thursday, March 11, 2021

NO ESCAPE (2020 - aka Follow Me)

No Escape Movie Review

A guy who looks like Bryce Harper and has lots of followers on social media takes his equally obnoxious friends to Moscow, Russia for the next stunt to quench his need for attention and praise from complete strangers. Once there, as tends to happen when Americans go to foreign countries in horror films, things go sideways and the gang find themselves in trouble. Speaking of other films, this one hits up several of them for inspiration, most obviously Saw and Hostel

She doesn't want to play this game

There have been many movies titled No Escape over the years, so let me clear this up real quick--this review is of the 2020 film of that name--it was originally titled Follow Me, but I guess that wasn't quite generic enough, so it was changed. If you are familiar with escape rooms, you'll understand what is happening here--if not, an escape room game is when a group of friends try to piece together clues to, yes, escape from a room or series of rooms before the clock runs out. Here, this is amped up to put the contestants potentially into real danger. It's a cool idea, and really what inspired my girlfriend to recommend we watch this one. Unfortunately, this movie fails in almost every way to live up to its promise. Within minutes, you will hate every single character we later see portrayed as the victims. Sadly, as the movie progresses, this never changes--we are never given reason to care what happens to them, so when they inevitably end up in peril, you will likely cheer for their demise. The acting seesaws between bad and brutally so--Keegan Allen's performance as the aforementioned social media star, Cole, is especially horrendous. There are some neat twists and turns once the movie gets going--unfortunately, I saw them all coming, but had I not, I'm sure the ride would have been more fun. There's little originality in this movie, and not a ton of gore, but you may want to watch for the reveal--if you do decide to view this movie, however, skip past the first 35 minutes. Nothing interesting happens during this time, and if you end up hating the film...well, at least you didn't have to sit through all of it.

On A Scale Of One To Ten: 4

No Escape Movie Trailer

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