Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021) Review

 "I'm not playing your game!"

-Zoey Davis

After surviving the events of the first movie, Zoey (Taylor Russell) and Ben (Logan Miller) travel to New York City to gather evidence against the Minos Corporation.  They quickly find themselves trapped in a new series of escape rooms with a group of other former players.  These veterans quickly discover that the games are more challenging than anything they have seen before.

What Works:

Just like in the first movie, the escape rooms themselves are awesome.  They all have fantastic designs and interesting methods to solve them.  The production design went all out and while none of them beat the upside-down bar room from the first movie, they give us some really fun sequences.

The pacing for the first half of the movie is really fantastic.  Once the games start, the movie throws you into the deep end alongside the characters.  It's frantic rush of a film that barely gives you a moment to catch your breath, which makes it easier to get into the same headspace as the characters.

Both Taylor Russell and Logan Miller do a good job.  Zoey and Ben have grown considerably since the last film and they have solid character arcs here.  They are easy to root for and are well developed, which can't be said of every character in the film.

What Sucks:

Just like in the first movie, the second half of this film is where things get messy.  Once they get to the 4th room, the movie feels like it's in a rush to end.  They kill off characters quickly and without much fanfare. The last two rooms also fly by, which is a shame.  It's more fun when they take it a little slower and let us really explore the room.  

The ending is also fairly anticlimactic.  There was a lot of build-up here and the pay-off doesn't really work.  If there's a 3rd film, maybe they can fix the narrative a bit.

This movie also retcons and adds scenes that weren't in the first film, but pretends like they were.  It's like they wrote themselves into a corner and cheated to get out of it.  It's some really sloppy writing.

Finally, the new characters are woefully underdeveloped.  The characters in the 1st film weren't exactly complex, but they had definable characteristics.  That really isn't the case here and all of them feel wasted. These are supposed to be champions.  Show us why they won and put them to good use before killing them off.

Verdict:

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is a lot like the original film: it starts off really strong, with some great sequences, but ends in a rushed, muddled mess.  However, the characters are less developed and the writing is much worse.  It's still a fun movie, but it's probably not worth paying to see in theaters.

 6/10: Okay