Amazing Dave

Before we get into Dave Made a Maze (2017), a little housekeeping. A few days ago, I wondered what I was going to do when Netflix stops sending out videos. It's a small thing, but I decided to link all streaming videos I watch to their JustWatch page. The way movies come on and off different services, I needed to find a stable link, and I hope this will be it.

So. We meet Dave (Nick Thune) when his girlfriend (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) is out of town. He does some painting, some carpentry, makes a little music, but nothing for very long. We get the idea: He is talented but unfocussed. When Kumbhani gets back, she finds a few boxes taped together taking up the middle of the apartment. It's Dave's fort, or maze.

She can talk to Dave through the vents and airshafts Dave has built in. He explains that he can't find his way out. He warns her not to come in because of all the boobytraps he has built. When she tries to pull it apart, we hear crashes from within and Dave screaming in terror. He asks her to get his friend Adam Busch. Adam in turn calls another friend, and they wind up with two more friends, a documentary filmmaker (James Urbaniak, looking distressingly like a young Kyle MacLachlin), his cameraman and boom operator, two Belgian tourists, and a random hobo who just came along for the laughs. 

Finally Kumbhani gets fed up and goes in - alone, she insists. Of course everyone follows her. The find that it is bigger on the inside - a multi-room cavern of cardboard. They wander around looking for Dave, and find odd wonders, like a giant head and living, flying origami birds. They also find deadly boobytraps. One woman steps on a foot switch and is decapitated by a cardboard sawblade. But instead og blood, red yard and confetti spurt from her neck. She's still dead though.

After many travails, wonders and senseless, yarny deaths, they come across Dave. They decide that to destroy the maze, they need to destroy its heart. But Dave forgot to make that part. He feels that the only way out is to finish building the maze. He's desperate - since he can never finish any of his projects, he just wants to finish this one. Even if it is killing his friends.

This is a fun and interesting movie, although I feel like you get a lot of it from just knowing the premise. It kind of struggled with the girlfriend, of course. So many of these movies are made from a man's point of view, a man who doesn't quite get a woman's point of view, who may even forget that she has a point of view. But Kumbhani gets a better role than that. She is exasperated at Dave for building the maze, but she neither a scold about it, or devoted follower. She's his friend and partner, and will help any way she can. In a lot of ways, it's more her movie than his.

The cast is made up of comics and TV actors for the most part, who do a great job. You'll be happy to know that most of them get out of the maze, but if you die in there - you don't come back.