THE FINAL LEVEL: ESCAPING RANCALA (2019)

THE FINAL LEVEL: ESCAPING RANCALA (2019)

Tagline: Jumanji Meets Ready Player One

(Action, Adventure, Being In A Video Game Gives You A Huge Ego) [PG-13]

Note: This movie wasn’t given an MPAA rating, but it likely would have gotten a PG-13. 

In this one Sarah loses her brother at a young age and his body is never found. Both always dreamed of opening an arcade and Sarah and her two business partners and longtime friends Rae and Chrissy do open one. After realizing her brother has been transported into one of the games, she decides to go into it with her friends in an attempt to rescue him. Once inside they are met with various challenges and must survive in order to accomplish their goal. 

First off, I really didn’t recognize any of the stars in this film and I watch a ton of B-movies, so that is pretty rare when it comes to anything distributed by THE ASYLUM. Having said that, it doesn’t look like they actually made this movie, I think they just “claimed it” as far as I can tell. 

Acting-wise, Jessica Chancellor plays Sarah and does a pretty solid job in this. She is probably best known for a garbage attempt at making a live version of SCOOBY-DOO! MYSTERY INCORPORATED called just "MYSTERY INCORPORATED". She was also in the FEAR PHARM series, but I haven’t seen those. The same goes for Emily Sweet who plays Chrissy, she was also in FEAR PHARM, but to be honest, in this one, there is nothing special about her performance. I think the same can be said about Tiana Tuttle who plays Rae. She was also in the FEAR PHARM series, so you can see a bit of a trend here. Brandon Root is actually decent as Jake because at least he gets asked to stretch a bit playing a duplicitous character. Bai Ling is also in this as “Challenger”, but her role is cut way back and honestly she barely has any purpose in this movie. I am sure she is better in other stuff, but I have no idea. I hate saying this but this was a really rough one for Taylor Behrens who plays “The King”. I think he was badly miscast. 

As far as the script, this thing is just okay, it reminds me a lot of a cross between JUMAJI and that was pretty much the point. It’s also made by a B-movie studio so the sharks, rhino, etc., are pretty bad. Not the worst, but pretty bad. 

What we do get in the movie is some pretty fun cheese and they got an attractive cast which never hurts. I am talking about the women; I don’t care about dudes. I will say that I think the studio was purposely taking a shot at fans that got bent about Karen Gillan’s outfit in the JUMANJI series because when the girls in this movie show up in the game they are just straight-up wearing bikinis and get outfits resembling the one Karen Gillan wore later. 

Regarding the score and cinematography, nothing is all that great, but what is nearly painful to watch is the weird coordinated fight scenes where Sarah and her friends are just kind of video game tag teaming on fight combos. I could see them doing this to make it more video game-like, but they kind of appear to be trying to get us to take these fight scenes seriously and it just falls flat. I do like that they used some SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD like “fight graphics”. I also liked that they had at least some fun creative things in this. 

Don’t walk into this one expecting JUMAJI or READY PLAYER ONE and you might get a kick out of this.

I give THE FINAL LEVEL: ESCAPING RANCALA a 4 out of 7, with the understanding that my expectations were near zero. 

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