Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions (15)

Escape room survivors Zoey Davis and Ben Miller embark on a crusade to expose the diabolical masterminds behind the game and bring them to justice. They board a Manhattan subway train and find themselves sharing a carriage with four strangers - Brianna, Nathan, Rachel and Theo - who have also played and beaten the escape room challenge. The six survivors face a new nightmare, which requires them to crack codes and solve puzzles within a strict time limit or pay the ultimate price.

LondonNet Film Review
Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions (15)

One wrong move proves fatal in director Adam Robitel’s sequel-by-numbers to his 2019 horror thriller, a gore-lite, teen-friendly variation on a theme of Saw which brought together six strangers to play for their lives in a series of diabolically designed rooms. His glossy follow-up is a direct continuation of the convoluted narrative, propelling two surviving characters on an ill-advised quest to bring to justice the murderous masterminds behind the Minos corporation. One tantalising scene from the original is noticeably omitted from an opening flashback montage – the filmmakers’ shorthand for “previously… on Escape Room” – and consequently draws attention to its importance in the grand design…

Puzzles in the sequel, credited to four writers, are satisfyingly complex, encouraging audiences to play along from their seats, but characters’ ingenuity under pressure is frustratingly inconsistent. One cryptic clue in a seaside-themed scenario could be solved far quicker and would change the outcome not just of that room but the entire film. At another critical juncture, scriptwriters are too cute for their own good and spoil arguably the biggest surprise with a needless introduction that tips the wink on Machiavellian ulterior motives. Taylor Russell and Logan Miller settle into a familiar groove of plucky likeability as the returning characters while a lack of background detail to most new additions to the cast spotlights the players most likely to make a fatal misstep.

Zoey Davis (Russell) and Ben Miller (Miller) barely survived their ordeal in the first Escape Room. A therapist (Lucy Newman-Williams) helps Zoe come to terms with her rage and guilt, anchored to the self-sacrifice of one motherly competitor (Deborah Ann Woll), while Ben suffers alone with repetitive nightmares of the walls closing in on him. The tormented duo are resolved to exposing the puppet masters by following coordinates embedded in the Minos logo, which point to an abandoned government building in the centre of Manhattan.

They board a subway train and find themselves sharing a carriage with four strangers – Brianna (Indya Moore), Nathan (Thomas Cocquerel), Rachel (Holland Roden) and Theo (Carlito Olivero) – who turn out to be victorious players from other Minos escape rooms. The six champions have been brought together to crack codes and conundrums in a strict time limit or pay the ultimate price: dodge successive chapters of the franchise, which are clearly teased by fleeting on-screen glimpses of the vast resources at Minos’ disposal.

Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions engineers more of the same largely bloodless thrills and spills, bringing the mythology full circle with minimum dramatic outlay. Set pieces look more expensive than the profitable first film but the same can’t be said of a script that fixates on a self-satisfied and knavish final destination rather than the satisfying journey to get there.

– Kim Hu