The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
Well, my demands have been met and my pleas have finally been answered. Here is a sequel to Escape Room. Yay. While the first film is a maddeningly bland version of Cube, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is, well, the exact same goddamn thing. But, for anybody that saw the first one and is wondering how this film will follow-up on the original’s cliffhanger ending, you are in for a masterclass in not giving a shit because it seems that the filmmakers actually cared less about the first one than I did.
The setup is pretty much the same as the first one. A group of strangers (including Zoey and Logan, the survivors from the first one) find themselves in a series of escape rooms filled with lethal traps and must solve puzzles to get out alive. The hook in the first one was that each person had miraculously been the sole survivor of some sort of tragedy. This time, each participant survived a previous escape room and, yes, somebody says the line “so it’s like a tournament of champions.” In fact, the movie and the trailer show different characters saying this line, so they bothered doing two takes of that gem (all I pictured in my head was Craig Robinson turning to the camera and say “it’s like a hot tub time machine”). I’ve survived sitting through two of these tragedies in a theater and nobody is calling me a champion, so these people can fuck themselves.
My one compliment is for the production designers, as the escape rooms (as absurdly conceived as they may be) do look great. There are four rooms (a subway, a bank, a beach and a child’s bedroom) and they all look great. Unfortunately, they make little sense. I have never done an escape room, but they conceptually remind me of old point-and-click puzzle games like The 7th Guest and D (I know I’m old, fuck off). On the surface, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea. However, puzzles such as the ones in those old games actually involve logical clues and conclusions. The progression in these escape rooms relies almost entirely on coincidences and leaps in logic that would stretch the grand canyon. There aren’t any “aha!” moments because the design of the games is so flawed, which left me just wishing that the characters would bumble their way to the end before I ran out of Milk Duds. Even though there are only four rooms, the film repeats the same basic scenario four times without any compelling reason for the audience to care, thus creating the illusion that the film’s 88-minute run time is actually closer to 24 hours.
The rooms may be uninteresting, but they are downright fascinating compared to our cast of characters. Our returning characters collectively have the personality of unbuttered toast and the other characters consist of one-note characteristics that the writer forgot to actually incorporate into the script. One of them used to be a priest. This amounts to nothing. One of them can’t feel pain. Almost amazingly, this is also meaningless. It’s almost as if they accidentally filmed an outline instead of the full script. I honestly don’t even remember who survived, which is my fault for waiting a few days before reviewing something this forgettable.
Alright, SPOILER ALERT for both this film and the original because I have to discuss how confounding the end of this movie is. Rarely have I been so irritated by the ending of a movie that I cared so little about, but I really don’t understand what the hell I just watched. The first film ends with the survivors determining that the villains are based in New York and they are going to fly there to track them down, but then we see that the villains are converting their plane into an escape room. I was a bit confused as to why the opening of this movie ignored that, but it turns out that there is a good reason for that: this movie ends on the same motherfucking plane. How? Did this entire movie somehow take place between the final two scenes of the last movie? If so, why would the villains put them into this scenario if they were also planning the escape room on the plane? And we know that they were still planning the plane because it’s alluded to early in the film in a completely nonsensical way. I recall that Saw 3 and Saw 4 took place at the same time and, therefore, ended at about the same point, but these events can’t be taking place concurrently because they share characters. There is also a surprise appearance of another character from the first film that implies that she has been through some shit since the ending of the first film, so when the fuck does this take place? This isn’t even a long-running-series; these people couldn’t keep their continuity straight for two fucking movies. None of this makes sense. If there is a third one of these and it ends on the goddamn plane, I am finally just going to lose it.
I’ve passed 850 words on a review that will probably get about zero views, so I think that about covers it. Much like the first one, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is a generic, safe, PG-13 thriller with forgettable characters that wouldn’t pass muster as a horror film at a twelve-year-old girl’s sleepover party. The writers couldn’t even be bothered to look up how the first film ended, for fuck’s sake. Now that’s indifference.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Room:_Tournament_of_Champions#/media/File:Escape_Room_Tournament_of_Champions_Movie_Poster.jpg
