If it weren’t a sequel to 2019’s Escape Room, which provided a horror twist on the booming trend for immersive themed puzzle environments, you could give Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions some bonus points for tapping into the zeitgeist: puzzles or not, the last thing anyone wants right now is to be locked in a room with other people. As it is, it’s flashy and diverting across its brief 88-minute runtime, but is ultimately a film about brainteasers with very few smarts of its own.
Newcomers needn’t feel worried – the film opens with a comprehensive extended highlights reel of the previous instalment, which saw Zoey (Taylor Russell) and Ben (Logan Miller) survive a series of death-infused escape rooms set up by shadowy cabal Minos, where the super-rich bet on players and watch the action as sport. If that sounds more than a little Hunger Games, the comparisons continue into Tournament Of Champions, which pitches the pair back into the game, this time with the same ‘All Stars’ set-up as The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Hoping to capture video proof of Minos’ twisted games and expose them to the world, the duo are soon forced to fight for their lives again alongside a spirited but thinly drawn selection of other previous survivors: travel blogger Brianna (Pose’s Indya Moore), nerve-damaged Rachel (Holland Roden), fallen priest Nathan (Thomas Cocquerel), and tough guy Theo (Carlito Olivero).
There’s no getting over how supremely silly it all is.
It’s a pulpy set-up, and returning director Adam Robitel provides moments of visual flair (an early walls-closing-in dream sequence plays out in a claustrophobic oner). But there’s no getting over how supremely silly it all is, the characters making daffy leaps of logic to figure out the labyrinthine clues and beat the ticking clock on each game. The death-chambers themselves — from an electrified subway car to a sprawling beach of sinking sand – are at once ludicrously lavish and unsatisfyingly simple. A set-piece in a laser-strewn bank (step on the wrong floor tile and you’re toast!) can’t help but feel like a murder-fied episode of The Crystal Maze. (Some added gags from Richard Ayoade wouldn’t make it any more laughable.)
The thinness is felt too in its bloodless PG-13 execution, and a lacklustre script full of ropey dialogue (“So what is this, like a tournament of champions?” asks one character in the worst say-the-title-in-the-movie line since that Will Smith Suicide Squad moment). The majority of the runtime consists of panicked screeching as time runs out, all serving to prove that watching people solve clues and argue isn’t as fun as solving clues and arguing yourself — in trying to capture the escape room experience, Tournament Of Champions has all the yelling and little of the satisfaction. Not that it matters — the whole things wraps up with a cynical non-ending that tees up a third chapter which looks like it’ll once again follow the Hunger Games playbook into Mockingjay territory. How about ‘Escape Room: The Floor Really Is Lava’?
