Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Adam Robitel
Starring: Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Indya Moore, Holland Roden, Thomas Cocquerel, Carlito Olivero
Remember escape rooms? A few years ago they replaced paintballing as
the de facto team-building activity for workplace days out. The premise
of an escape room is that a bunch of people are trapped in a room and
must figure out how to escape using whatever objects and clues they find
lying about the space. Of course, the pandemic put paid to the fad,
which makes this sequel seem almost nostalgic.
Escape rooms were so popular that no less than three movies were
released in 2019 under the title 'Escape Room'. All of them were
basically conceptual knock-offs of Vicenzo Natali's cult '90s sci-fi
Cube, or tamer versions of the Saw sequels, as their
protagonists negotiated their way through a series of escape rooms,
losing members along the way. The most successful of the three films to
bear the same name was a mainstream studio offering from director
Adam Robitel, which now gets the sequel treatment.
That film
saw a bunch of strangers forced to put their heads together to make it
out of a series of elaborate escape rooms alive. Only two managed to
survive - shy science nerd Zoey (Taylor Russell) and alcoholic
stockroom worker Ben (Logan Miller). This sequel finds the pair
struggling to get on with their lives, with Zoey obsessed with exposing
the people responsible for their ordeal, a sinister corporation known as
Migos who broadcast their torment for the entertainment of online
punters.
Following a clue, Zoey and Ben make their way to New York City, but
while aboard a subway train they realise they've been duped once more.
Their subway carriage disconnects from the rest of the train and traps
them along with four strangers. It turns out everyone aboard the
carriage is a survivor of one of Migos's escape rooms. Yes folks, it's
the Champions League of escape artists.
As with its predecessor, the experience of watching
Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is a lot like
watching a game show. Now, there are two types of game shows – those
that the audience can join in with by answering questions along with the
participants, and those that the audience simply sits back and watches,
generally involving physical rather than mental trials. Watching the
Escape Room movies is like watching a game show of the
latter variety. It's impossible for the audience to get invested in the
travails of the films' protagonists because we're never put in their
shoes. In a real escape room you get an overview of your entire
situation and can begin to figure out a means of escape by taking in
your surroundings. Because cinematic storytelling can only offer you one
piece of information at a time, the audience doesn't have that ability
here. That means we're never able to figure out the rooms ahead of or
even along with our protagonists. That leaves us simply watching as they
figure it out for themselves. If ever a concept should have been a video
game rather than a movie, it's this one.
This budding franchise doesn't even give us the fun of any elaborate
deaths. The unlucky contestants just fall through holes, which allows
the possibility for them to pop up later in the story, and also of
course enables the film to court a teenage audience. With a bit more
invention and the addition of a much needed sense of humour, this could
have been a light-hearted rival to the Saw series. I'm
sure real life escape rooms are a lot of fun, but this franchise isn't
exactly the best advertisement for the activity.
