Mark Reviews Movies: ESCAPE ROOM: TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 15, 2021

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions cares even less about its characters than the sequel's predecessor, and that's saying something. Here, we once again watch as six people participate in a series of potentially deadly challenges and puzzles against their will, across the course of several rooms rigged for severe injury or death. The first victim dies in the first space before anyone even catches his name, and besides a couple of returning characters, the names of these people are about as much depth as the filmmakers are willing to give them.

That's a shame, because the screenplay, penned by returning writer Maria Melnik and a trio of newcomers to the burgeoning series (Will Honley, Daniel Tuch, and Oren Uziel), begins with a fairly smart gimmick. This isn't just about searching for clues, solving riddles, and avoiding multiple traps within a bunch of escape rooms. It's about feeling trapped by the trauma of having gone through something like this once already.

The movie opens about six weeks after the events of the first movie, with returning protagonist Zoey (Taylor Russell) trying to deal with the fear, paranoia, and uncertainty with a therapist (played by Lucy Newman-Williams). She can't start her life again, knowing that the evil organization known as Minos is still out there, and, as a result, can't help but see the world as a dangerous place.

The same goes for her friend Ben (Logan Miller), the other survivor of the events of the first movie (given a rapid-fire recap right the top). The two believe they have found the location of Minos' headquarters in New York City, and after some convincing on her part, Zoey and Ben decide to drive across the country (She's still afraid to fly, on account of an older trauma), find proof of Minos and their misdoings, and hold them to account.

That's all the setup the filmmakers can or are willing to muster. After the location turns out to be a dead end and a brief chase into the subway, Taylor and Ben find themselves unwilling participants in another series of potentially fatal escape rooms. The first, somewhat cleverly, is a subway car, rigged to decouple from the rest of the train and trap the two, as well as four other "winners" of similar challenges, in a locked space, gradually being increasingly electrified.

Like with the first movie, the point doesn't really involve these characters. We know about Taylor and Ben's experiences and back stories, and we learn just enough about new competitors Rachel (Holland Ellis), Brianna (Indya Moore), and Nathan (Thomas Cocquerel) to know they also have experienced the pain and trauma of Minos' twisted game (The sixth player, played by Carlito Olivero, is dead so quickly that it's about all we learn about him).

The real point is the supposed inventiveness of the assorted rooms. Some of them, like the train car and an "art deco bank of death," are fairly clever in terms of design and peril (bolts of electricity for the subway car and a maze of flesh-slicing lasers within the bank).

A fake beach, with walls painted like the ocean and sand that eventually starts sinking, feels a bit too busy and familiar (The characters point this out, which, one supposes, is meant to excuse that latter part), and a faux street corner is laid out beneath time-delayed sprinklers spewing acid. The puzzles to these later rooms just seem as if the screenwriters are trying to rush to the climax and whittle down the unnecessary baggage of extraneous characters.

The team of screenwriters and returning director Adam Robitel mainly run into the same central problem as the first movie. There's little tension for two significant reasons. First, it's pretty dull watching these characters yell out observations and shout about potential clues, especially since the logic of the puzzles in each room is alternately simple and muddy—transparently contrived, in other words. The second reason, of course and again, is the fact that these characters, left mainly to scream and holler about what they're seeing, are so thinly established and developed that their respective fates are pretty much transparent, too.

The sequel is yet again a gimmicky concept, searching for and never finding a way for the conceit to work. Escape Room: Tournament of Champions makes its diabolical spaces the star, but if this series is to continue (It surely will, if the sequel-setting epilogue is any indication), it needs at least some kind of foundation to make us care about the people in these rooms.

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