Escape Room: Tournament of Champions

 

6/10

In this sequel to Escape Room, the evil Minos Corporation has again kidnapped Zoey Davis (Taylor Russell) as well as other survivors of their deadly, and delightfully unbelievable, escape rooms to once again compete.

The movie does deliver what it promises when it comes to the death traps. If that's only what you came for, you should be pleased. It's another creative array of truly harrowing and detailed death games. The production crew definitely earned their pay on building these sets. That having been said, I personally think the first movie's death traps stood out more, with the beach trap being the only super visually memorable one in this. They're making the mind games a little complicated here, so it can be hard to follow and I think that one of the traps near the end was too nasty for it's own good. But my complaints aside. I mostly liked the deadly rooms here; I'm just saying the first ones beat them in a contest.  

I'm liking the new victims in this. Good cast with distinctive personalities.

The plot is why I'm not ranking this higher. First off there is one major plot hole that is pretty clear from the start. Minos does something that doesn't match up with how it operated in the last film. In fact, one of the characters bring that up. However, the writers never bother giving an actual answer for why for the lack of consistency. That issue alone probably wouldn't have been that big a deal, but in the third act the story just falls apart. I know that a movie about a secret cabal operating death games for betting and amusement isn't really a grounded idea, but the script gets nonsensical and needlessly complicated. Really disappointed in the ending. Sure, the last film went out of it's way to set up the next film, but it did end mostly on a reasonable and satisfying note. This finale left me empty.    

If you just want to see the death traps, you'll be fine. But if you don't like it when horror movies do really dumb or unnatural things, there's a good chance you'll be turned off by this.