Director – Matt Eskandari, Screenplay – Adam Lawson, Producers – Jonathan Shih, Wellington Sun & Daniel Wei, Photography – Brtt Juskalian, Music – Evan Evans, Visual Effects – Redin Kumar, Makeup Effects – Michael Del Rossa, Production Design – Tom Lisowski. Production Company – Kol Entertainment.
Cast
Warren Kole (David Hellar), Bai Ling (Kim Lee), Jamie Ray Newman (Emma), Dustin Nguyen (Jin-Soo), Nick Lane (Tyler), Jude Ciccolella (William Hellar), Queenie (Morgan)
Plot
Police officer David Hellar comes around in a mysterious labyrinth. There are four others in there with him. David deduces that the rooms they are in can be opened by a numeric puzzle based on Biblical references. It is also discovered that each of them is a murderer. They wonder if they are in Hell. David realises that they are meant to kill each other until only one survives as in the Biblical story of Gideon.
The Gauntlet/Game of Assassins was the second film for expatriate Iranian director Matt Eskandari. Eskandari made his directorial debut with the horror film Victim (2010) and went on to 12 Feet Deep (2017), his greatest success, a survival thriller about two girls trapped under a pool cover. He has subsequently made Trauma Center (2019), Hard Kill (2020), Survive the Night (2020) and Wire Room (2022), most of which are thrillers that feature people imprisoned in some manner.
The film has an odd setting – a series of interlocked rooms, some of which are partially flooded, others overgrown with foliage – and a series of cryptic puzzles that must be deciphered if they are to pass into the next room. I suspect that Matt Eskandri was at the time trying to make was a copy of Saw (2004) or one of its sequels with people trapped inside a room and having to fight to the death and/or solve puzzles to get out. Of course if The Gauntlet had been made just a few years later, all of this would have made it one of the spate of escape room films – as per the likes of Escape Room (2017), Escape Room (2017) and Escape Room (2019).
Where The Gauntlet/Game of Assassins starts to get weird is when it gets into strange levels of Biblical allegory. Each of the rooms is seen as levels of Hell – this is alluded to Dante, who actually referred to them as circles, but that is not worth debating. Warren Kole discovers that one of the puzzles involve his knowledge of the Biblical Gideon going to Hell and having to eliminate his own warriors in a fight – except that this is an entirely made-up story and does not appear in the Biblical account of Gideon. The group then find they have to fight one another in an elimination round.
Trapped in the labyrinth – (l to r) Dustin Nguyen, Bai Ling, Jamie Ray Newman, Warren Kole and Nick Lane
The film’s ending involves the survivors [PLOT SPOILERS] discovering that they are in Hell. They meet a cabal of hooded figures, one of whom is Warren Kole’s father, who reveals that solving the labyrinth is all part of a purpose that has been instilled in him since birth. Exactly what is going on here becomes nonsensical in its explanations.
The Gauntlet is not related to nor should be confused with the fine Clint Eastwood film The Gauntlet (1977). The film was renamed Game of Assassins in subsequent release, awkwardly trying to capitalise on the success of tv’s Game of Thrones (2011-9). The film was made as a Chinese co-production deal and filmed in Beijing, featuring several Chinese actors, most notedly the international crossover success of Bai Ling.
