[EXPRESSO] Dedalus (2024) | Game Of Influence

Italian film time again, with Dedalus from director Roberto Manzetti, which premiered last December at Noir In Festival, and is now hitting theathers (during the now usual nationwide summer cinema promotional sale for European and Italian films).

The premise sees 6 influencers selected to partecipate in “Dedalus”, a highly marketed social network event that will see the partecipants compete in a series of trials, all livestreamed from a secret location, with the promise of further fame and riches.

But as the program goes on, the trails reveal themselves to be more and more dangerous, as the influencers end up caught in an elaborate vengeance plot…

It’s odd, because at times it looks like a influencer version of Squid Game, but it’s not that, yet it’s not really Saw, nor it’s akin to “PG13 non-horror Saw” that was Escape Room (there no enviromental puzzles or elaborate escape scenarios), and while it occasionally uses horror imagery and some horror adjacent material, it’s not a horror film.

I’ve seen a decent share of modern italian films that flirt with horror without having the nerve to actually commit to that, or do but give up half-way or simply don’t label themselves as such…. this one actually works well and i wasn’t left wishing it was gory, it works quite well (in spite of a shaky first act) since it is a thriller about vengeance at heart.

Also, Dedalus has some good atmosphere, good acting, some good plot twists too, i do like how utterly despicable – to be kind – its protagonists are, and while it could dig more into the modern themes – and issues of the social media world we live in – it tackles, i do like how it also avoids trying to clump together some cheap moralisms and “excuse” anyone.

[EXPRESSO] Escape Room 2: Tournament Of Champions (2021) | Sequel Gauntlet

Why i’m even reviewing this one, since it already released here months ago? It’s because it was so scarcely distributed that just NOW it hit theathers in my region, i mean, it’s not like it reviewed well at all, and clearly even distributors didn’t gave much of a toss about the sequel to “non-horror PG Saw” .

I didn’t expect i would actually get another chance to see it in theathers.

I did enjoy the first Escape Room for what it was, a non-horror version of Saw made more for a teen audience, it was pretty obvious what they were going after, if the pandemic didn’t happen i’d figure we would already be at Escape Room 3, as this one was greenlit in hope to milk sequels emulating Saw and other popular horror series… while sidestepping the “horror” label.

Frankly i’m not even sure this series will even be able to count to three, more due to relatively bad timing and diminishing box office returns, as this one ends with an even more direct cliffhanger.

Whatever, is the movie itself any good? Not really, and not entirely due to the usual case of diminishing returns, as this one really doesn’t care about any kind of crescendo or building up to anything, just being a rollercoaster ride of deadly escape rooms scenarios, from beginning to end.

The upside it’s that the plot moves really fast, the “trap scenarios” are actually entertaining, varied, quite fun, but everything else surrounding them is as stock and predictable as ever, as the big brain characters manage to somehow still don’t see the obvious “twists” coming, despite them of all people should know better. They don’t.

It’s far from boring, but it just comes off as a worse version of the first movie…….. not quite ideal for a sequel.

[EXPRESSO] Escape Room (2019) | Playing Games, Makin’ Names

Escape Room 2019 movie poster.jpg

NOT to be confused with the omonynous 2017 movie directed by Will Wernick, which i didn’t see (it was supposed to screen in my country just before this one, but i guess it didn’t, at all).

Anyway, “Escape Room 2019” is about six vastly different individuals that receive a strange cube containing the invitation to an exclusive escape room by a company named Minos. After they all gather in a waiting room, they soon realize the game has already started, and the team must scramble and work together to solve the riddles and proceed to the next room, in what soon appear to be challenges with one goal: survival, at any cost.

It’s basically a non-horror (kinda, there’s some blood, but not gore) take on Saw, which i like even if it’s quite obvious, since here we also have a team of people that seems random at first (but isn’t, at all), and we see them try to cooperate (or not) for a common goal of surviving a deadly challenge of intellect and action, set up for unknown reasons by a misterious, evil mastermind, watching from the shadows.

Heck, even the way it starts is so typical of Saw. 😉

But it’s better than most of the late entries in the Saw franchise, it’s a better written movie than the disappointing Saw: Legacy/Jigsaw we got back in 2017, and it’s actually better than expected, with some surprises, good atmosphere, and mostly decent-to-good performances.

What stops it from being “good”/more than decent is the characterization, with some characters never actually growing out of the clichè they seem at first, and the shameless (but kinda “honest”) way it sets up a sequel, one in what Sony wants to be an annualized franchise. Again, like Saw, which isn’t a promising scenario.

We’ll see, i guess.

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