There's no escaping this hot entertainment trend coming to The Colony: Called The Escape Game, it's the biggest escape room outfit in the U.S., and it's about to become a little bigger with a new location opening in The Colony at Grandscape in January 2023.
The Escape Game was founded in 2014 and currently has 29 locations everywhere from vacation destinations like Orlando and Las Vegas to high-end retail locations like Westfield Century City in Los Angeles and Madison Ave in New York.
The company creates highly-produced sets and multi-room experiences, and participants engage in hour-long missions, where they're given clues to uncover and puzzles to solve -- designed by a team at The Escape Game’s headquarters in Nashville.
In Texas, they have locations in Austin, Houston, and Grapevine, which opened in 2017, arriving in the thick of the escape room trend in Dallas which has seen arrivals (and some departures) such as Escapology, Escape the Room, Dallas Panic Room, and Ultimate Escape Game.
More than $2 million has been invested in the Grandscape location, a 6,760-square-foot facility which will host five escape rooms with the following themes:
Prison Break
Playground
Gold Rush
The Depths
Special Ops: Mysterious Market
Grandscape, the 433-acre center in The Colony anchored by Nebraska Furniture Mart, keeps adding to its collection of entertainment options which include Andretti Indoor Karting & Games, Gamebox, an outdoor amphitheater, and a location of Cosm, an interactive venue set to open in 2024.
“We knew we wanted to be in a place that both locals and visitors loved spending time and we think we found it at Grandscape.," says Jonathan Murrell, co-founder and CMO of The Escape Game.
Actor Jimmy Stewart, thanks to movies such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Shop Around the Corner, and The Philadelphia Story, had the reputation early in his career as the everyman in Hollywood, someone to whom most audiences could relate. That became even more true when Stewart entered the military during World War II, a period that is explored in the new biopic, Jimmy.
The film was co-produced with Fort Worth-based Papaian Studios and received a red-carpet premiere as part of the Lone Star Film Festival on Wednesday, November 4. Stewart had several ties to Fort Worth, which were celebrated at the event.
Stewart (KJ Apa) was riding high in 1941, coming off his first (and only) Oscar win for The Philadelphia Story. As depicted in the film, his life is upended when he receives a military draft notice as the U.S. prepares for war. He’s determined to serve, but people like studio head Louis B. Mayer (Jason Alexander) try to talk him out of it. Already an experienced pilot, he eventually joins the war in Europe, flying the B-24 bomber.
Despite his celebrity status, Stewart requests to be treated the same as any other soldier, which means flying multiple missions over enemy territory. He moves up the ranks, becoming a leader tasked with, among other things, reporting the deaths of service members to their families. He also starts a friendship that develops into a romance with Lady Julia (Kara Killmer), giving him a distraction from the horrors of war.
Directed by Aaron Burns and written by Justin Strawhand, the film has the clear goal of being a hagiography for Stewart, showing all of his good qualities and few of his bad ones. In fact, the character of Stewart is harder on himself than the actual movie is, chastising himself over the deaths of fellow soldiers that he likely could not have prevented. The filmmakers go to great lengths to show how good and well-respected Stewart was, something that may well be true, but doesn’t make for great drama.
The bulk of the film features Stewart at war, following him and others as they fly multiple missions and commiserate over the price of combat. The sequences are fine, but the film’s budget does not appear to be high, and so the CGI needed to recreate the scenes is noticeably subpar. Because Burns and Strawhand usually keep to surface-level storytelling and don’t go deep on any character besides Stewart, his time at war is engaging but slight.
The film is bookended by Stewart and Frank Capra (Max Casella) making It’s a Wonderful Life, Stewart’s first film after coming back from war. It’s here where the movie becomes most interesting as Stewart, still affected by his war experience, struggles to bring the character of George Bailey to life. The behind-the-scenes look at the film-within-the-film and the recreations of its iconic scenes are catnip for anyone who knows/loves the Christmas classic.
Apa, best known for starring as Archie on the TV show Riverdale, does extremely well as Stewart. He nails Stewart’s quavering voice and the way he ambles about plays right into the actor’s established persona. Casella and Killmer get the most play in supporting roles, and each does solid work as characters trying to understand Stewart. Alexander, Sarah Drew as Hedda Hopper, and Rob Riggle as a colonel each go a little too big in their respective parts.
Jimmy is probably best watched as an approximation of the man Stewart was in the 1940s, not as something that’s completely true to life. The film elides or stretches the truth on multiple occasions, which is par for the course in biopics. It could have used some stronger storytelling to make Stewart feel like a real person, not merely a replica of the famous actor.
