Great premise, damaged by the ending

Rating: 6/10 (24 February 2008)

Basically, this movie is exactly what the DVD box cover says: 6 people are trapped inside a maze/death-trap. They try to get out.
It isn't really about the prison, though. It's about how people react to stress. And it's about the design of the prison.
The basic premise reads like a Twilight-Zone episode. 6 people wake up in a series of interconnected rooms. Some of these rooms kill their occupants in various ways.
Each person was placed there with a specific function in mind. One person is a cop, who has leadership qualities. One is a doctor, able to treat the wounded. One is a high-school student, who's math knowledge is still fresh in her mind. One is one of the people who built a component of the place, who brings unique knowledge of the prison. One is apparently autistic, able to perform complex math computations easily. One is an escape artist loner-type who gets himself killed early on to remind the audience that anyone can die.
The prison acts as a personality-conflict engine, as it forces people to interact to save each other's lives and their own.
It's a great premise, the interlocking prison that they have to figure out the secrets to. And, as with any human endeavor, dealing with each other becomes increasingly hard as dehydration and stress wear down their patience.
The problem comes when one of them, quite suddenly, snaps and starts killing them. For no apparent reason.
I understand that tensions were running high. But when the most likable and reasonable character in the entire movie starts going nuts and killing people for no apparent reason, it kinda sullies the character interactions.
Granted, this was a problem with the dialog as a whole. People thrust into the situation seemed entirely too unwilling to tell each other things. I can understand panic. But after an hour in the death maze, when someone asks what skills you could contribute, I would expect people to give a full resume/CV including personal histories, not, "I'm a doctor, like 10 million others." There was a lot of confrontation in the movie, even at the beginning when dehydration and exhaustion hadn't set in yet. They just seemed to want to argue rather than attempt to reason a way out.
Despite the ending and a degree of contravity with the dialog, the movie works reasonably well.