Studio: Lionsgate
Director: Emerson Moore
Writer: Emerson Moore, Joshua Dobkin, Sean Wathen
Producer: Michael Philip, Jason Moring, Emerson Moore, Evangelo Kioussis, Simon Baxter, Andrew Davies Gans
Stars: Jordan Claire Robbins, Theo Rossi, Tahirah Sharif, Julian Feder, Elena Juatco, Shane West
Review Score:
Summary:
With no memory of how they got there, six strangers must find their way out of a massive cornfield while being hunted by a mysterious creature.
Review:
There are two reasons why you don’t see more advance reviews on Culture Crypt prior to a movie’s release date. The first is that I don’t blip bright enough on big studio radars. I’m a straight-shooting critic who couldn’t care less about providing pull quotes or putting a PR person’s agenda ahead of my honest opinion. My reach isn’t especially broad either. Rope it all together and the Paramount Pictures and Universal Studios of the world don’t have a whole lot of incentive to pay attention to me, let alone send screeners or swag.
Indie companies on the other hand, contact me regularly. But the reason I nearly never accept their solicitations to review lower-ranked B-movies is that I dread inevitably having to tell them that they’re repping a stinker, which too often ends up being the truth. Even when they ping me first, I still feel like they’re doing me a favor by offering an early look at a film, and for free at that. It’s a cringey situation to then have to follow up with, “Thanks for hooking me up! But, uh, I think the movie is a P.O.S. and I’m going to trash it in a way where anyone who hears my thoughts most definitely won’t want to watch it.” Yeah, I’m not that much of an a-hole.
That’s the reason why I’m writing about “Escape the Field” the week after its release instead of the week before. I received seven separate messages from two different marketing organizations with invitations to request an advance screener for coverage consideration. I almost accepted the offer too. Early reviews bring traffic, and with “real” life increasingly eating up the time I can waste on DIY Amityville junk, I’d benefit greatly from getting out in front of a film and letting that review sit at the top of the main page for a spell.
But to begin with, the movie’s summary didn’t sound super enticing. Six strangers wake up in a cornfield with no recollection of how they got there. Each of them possesses a single item providing a clue to their predicament, and a possible solution to solving the puzzle that will open a path toward freedom… if the unseen entity stalking in the shadows doesn’t kill them all first.
Right away, I vaguely thought I’d seen this movie before. Long story short, it turns out I was thinking of “Triggered” (review here), a thriller from 2020 where “nine former friends must solve a mystery connected to their pasts when they wake up in the woods wearing explosive vests.” Still, kind of the same thing, making “Escape the Field” yet another post-“Saw” riff on the premise of suspicious strangers fighting to figure their way out of a deadly, diabolically overcomplicated conspiracy.
There was also the matter of “Escape the Field” coming from Lionsgate. Lionsgate still has their hand in solid theatrical releases every now and again. But their direct-to-VOD dreck is almost entirely indistinguishable from the subpar stuff squeezed out under the Gravitas Ventures or Uncork’d Entertainment banners.
The next clue that we were in for a clunker came from the cast. I truly think Theo Rossi can be terrific under the right circumstances, and he’ll always be one of my faves from “Sons of Anarchy.” Yet now that he switched from the small screen to features, he seems to prioritize quantity over quality, as he’s appeared in quite a few flotsam films since SOA went off the air. And aside from Rossi, everyone else in “Escape the Field” is an unrecognizable name with what would turn out to be a forgettable face and indistinct acting abilities too.
So once again, rope everything together and I didn’t need a Magic 8-Ball to see “all signs point to no.” Well, that prediction came true. “Escape the Field” unsurprisingly ended up being as sleepily generic as its equally simplistic title. While I wasn’t able to avoid a wholly underwhelming entertainment experience, at least I have the saving grace of sidestepping an awkward email to a publicist where I’d have to find an eloquent way to say, “Sorry, this movie sucks.”
“Escape the Field’s” core sextet is almost as nondescript as the people portraying them. There’s a nurse, a military vet, a prep school kid, a woman in a nightgown because she was in the middle of seducing her lover before she was kidnapped, a father, and an absolutely insufferable bitch whose job is to get on everyone’s nerves, and boy howdy does she succeed. Cameron could be the most obnoxious take on the selfish coward stereotype I’ve ever seen in one of these things, which might be the only backhanded praise I can award this movie. Everyone else gets a single scene to summarize their personal background in three or four sentences, and that’s as far as anything comes close to constituting character “development.”
I suppose I could also commend “Escape the Field” for being a single-location endeavor that doesn’t spend 90 dull minutes inside one white-walled home or boringly bland building. Instead, “Escape the Field” spends 80 minutes outside against a backdrop of cornstalks, cornstalks, and more cornstalks. The pattern repeats so often that it becomes like one of those reused “Flintstones” frames where Fred and Wilma walk past the same stone and palm tree over and over and over again.
Getting tiresomely repetitive may be what “Escape the Field” does best. As the perfunctory nobodies jog around encountering minimal danger, a meager mystery bereft of tangible tension inspires little engagement from the audience’s imagination, culminating in a sloppy, “wait, what just happened?” ending that bounces right off your disinterest without really registering. In the end, even the most optimistic disposition can hope for no higher of a reaction than, “Eh, I kind of liked it” in spite of everyone else raining rightful disdain all over the movie.
NOTE: There is a mid-credits scene.
Review Score: 40
If you want to see impossible amounts of blood explode crimson colors like the world’s worst version of a gender reveal, well, “Abigail” at least has that.