#daniyar

Cole is a social media star who, along with his semi-annoying posse goes to Russia to do an escape room. Sounds sketchy? It is! When they first arrive they go clubbing and Cole’s girlfriend Erin gets assaulted in the club which is seriously not cool (and Cole was almost too busy vlogging to notice). After that they go to the escape room where things get a little scary pretty quick. First Cole is made to get a key out of a dead man's intestines and Cole accepts very quickly that he has to cut into this dead guy. I am not sure if it is because he thinks it is fake or what but he does it with very little complaint and digs around inside him too. Wack! It took a little more debate in the first Saw movie but here he just went slice happy.

Next he finds his friends in a myriad of torture devices like the rack, an electric chair, and a water tank. Cole is tasked with little minigames in order to free his friends, each getting more serious 'til he reaches his girlfriend, Erin, in the water tank and she nearly drowns. Okay, she sort of does drown but she coughs it back up, I mean, we WATCHED her swallowing the water (right?). At this point things are serious and the gang just wants to get out and go home (sad face). But they are trapped! They have to try and break out! So they escape the escape room but they escape to the harsh reality of they are in Russia and are fucked because the guys from the bar are here outside the escape room and are shooting everyone up. They are nice and take the Americans hostage though which was very unnecessary of them all things considered but it did make the movie last longer so I guess it was for plot reasons and not just out of the goodness of their hearts. 

At the bad guys hide away they are filming for Russian viewers who like to watch people get ripped up and killed (wack!) (also The Den). Cole has to watch one by one as his friends are murdered as he makes all sorts of attempts to escape, even getting a chance at one point to go off without saving the last two of his friends left, but he refuses, he must save his friends. I don’t know if he is brave, stupid, or both, but he goes back into enemy territory. He finds one friend but then promptly loses him to a baddie which was pretty rough, not gonna lie. And finally it is all down to him and his girlfriend. He wants to save her so badly and comes so close but then she gets shot in the head in front of him. A literal devastating blow. Cole retreats to a closet. His world in pieces. The bad guys banging on the door. He sees a hatch with a light and goes through… and there is Alexei, their Russian tour guide/double crosser. Standing, smiling. 

Cole doesn’t hesitate, he, like an animal, attacks Alexei. He doesn’t hear what the man has to say, he doesn’t hear that his friends are alive, all he hears is his own heart beat pounding in his ears as he beats this man to death for what he has done. And then the lights come up and everyone comes out. Horrified. The look of horror from the movie poster isn’t from Erin scared in the water, it is from her realizing her boyfriend actually killed a man.

What a devastating movie, I mean, they put their friend in such a position that he thinks his only way to literally survive is to kill? Wack as fuck. I’m not sure what they thought he was going to do when presented with Alexei at the very end after watching each one of his friends “die.” Seriously, that was one messed up “social experiment” and these kids just didn’t even think about the consequences. Now the poor guy is scarred for life, not just because he killed a guy, but because he thinks he watched a bunch of people die and it was all just a “prank, bro.” That is beyond messed up, especially his girlfriend dying on him twice (drowning then gunshot). Wild film, sad twist, good twist, made up for killing off everyone.

I thought about this movie and its ending for a while after the movie was over, wondering if it could have gone differently and unfortunately whatever schemes I come up with don’t matter, the circumstances were that the main character, Cole, was led to killing a man in what we now know was cold blood. It was a very sad end to a pretty fucked up movie. The fact that I thought about it afterwards means it had an impact on me though so I have to give credit where it is due there.