The ending of Escape Room teased another doomed plane ride for heroine Zoey Davis (Taylor Russell) and fellow survivor Ben Miller (Logan Miller). The implication being that they’re once again one step behind in their quest to stop the evil Minos Corporation. Its sequel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, quickly bypasses that ending and finds a new way to pull the pair back into a new, elaborate escape room more impressive than the last. When it sticks to that formula, the sequel mostly works. But Tournament of Champions rushes to break its rules, retconning much of what worked about the first.
After a bizarre yet important therapy session that includes details on how a panic attack derailed Minos’s plane trap, Zoey and Ben opt to drive to Manhattan for proof of the deadly escape rooms. Instead, they get lured into a subway car along with four other occupants. When the rigged trap springs, the six realize they’ve all survived Minos’s escape room before and entered against their will into a new game that aims to determine the best of the best.
Pictured: Rachel (Holland Roden), Nathan (Thomas Cocquerel), Ben Miller (Logan Miller), Brianna (Indya Moore) and Zoey Davis (Taylor Russell).
Much like the first, Tournament of Champions works best when it focuses on lethal puzzle solving across an intricately designed series of rooms. The electrified subway car makes for a decent warm-up, but the production design of the subsequent rooms often outshines the first film’s set pieces. Director Adam Robitel once again showcases an ability to wring tension out of each room with increasingly more gruesome means of dying. Especially against the ticking clock, which becomes even more exacting here.
While the sequel gives a brief background on the four new players, namely in the defining trait that shaped their respective games, it doesn’t bother much with development. The return of the two key protagonists reduces the stakes and dooms the new cast as fodder. It can be tough to invest when we never worry for Zoey, we’re just guessing which stranger dies next. That’s fine for the most part because, again, the true star is the production design and extravagant traps. But the third act quickly rushes the familiar formula to dive into a lackluster finale that retcons some aspects from the first. For the worse, the lack of care for the new cast starts to aggravate. Not even the returning players fair well.
Rachel (Holland Roden) in an electrified subway train.
Zoey once again acts as the star game player, but it’s evident that her story hit a wall by the end of Escape Room. Nothing new gets added to her drive to stop Minos, and it just becomes a tired retread in the third act. Ben doesn’t have much to do either, outside of his role as a doting supporter. By the end, the characters we once rooted for have spun themselves into frustrating loops. With four screenwriters- Will Honley, Maria Melnik, Daniel Tuch, Oren Uziel- and story credits by Christine Lavaf, Fritz Böhm, it’s surprising that the answer to the first film’s end hook is to offer, essentially, more of the same stagnating story.
Much like the first, the sequel works best when Robitel gets to play with the escape room format. Challenging characters to think fast as death encroaches, either by way of fire, lasers, or worse, makes for a thrilling time. Luckily, that makes up a large part of the sequel. It’s when it attempts to break its own story rules and opts to slow down to a crawl to rehash the same story, weakening rooting interest in its protagonists in the process, that it stops being a game worth playing.
Escape Room: Tournament of Champions releases in theaters on July 16.
