Review #137: Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)

This review was originally written in October 2021.

October 2021 Horror Movie Review #23- Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)

I'm on a road trip right now and didn't have time to watch a zombie movie, so this is a review for a different horror movie we saw at the drive-in a week or so ago.

I'll go on the record any day and say that I loved the first Escape Room movie, so much that it prompted me to look up and watch basically every Escape Room-themed movie I could find (nearly all of which are terrible). So I was super excited when I heard that it got an actual sequel! The previous movie left off on a good note, and when all was said and done I'm not sure if the second movie quite delivered on the premise or not. But overall it was definitely a fun time, even if it wasn't as good as the first.

Ultimately this movie just kind of feels... lesser, in just about every way, compared to the previous one. The first movie had more rooms, more puzzles, more twists (especially twists that actually amounted to anything), and it just felt like it packed a ton more content into roughly the same runtime. I love the idea of this group of players all being survivors of previous escape rooms, but the previous movie had some additional commonality between the players that this one alluded to but didn't establish. I like how the beginning of the film seemed (to me at least) like it was setting up a late-act twist, but how that ended up articulating (or not) as the film went on felt like it missed the mark by a wide margin.

The identity and/or personality of the organization behind all of these deadly escape rooms is just as ambiguous, inconsistent, and nonsensical as it was in the first, which makes me kind of wonder why this movie was even made in the first place. They could've delved more deeply into the bad guys, but they didn't. They could've delved more into the characters! But they didn't. The puzzles weren't particularly more complex than the previous one, and some of the twists led literally nowhere. (Very small spoilers- one of the escape rooms ends up having two possible exits, and the question of where each of them led was played up quite a bit. But two minutes later, you learn- surprise! Both exits lead to literally the same place! What a twist, right?)

Without spoiling the ending, I just really think that the ending we got makes basically the entire movie feel like it made no sense, beyond calling back to something earlier and serving as a last-second twist. I just feel like this movie seriously lacked the direction and purpose the first one had, and to be perfectly honest, just felt like a cash grab rather than something inevitable. The locations were all detailed and interesting, the plot was at least mostly coherent (unlike literally every other Escape Room-themed movie, seriously), and this film just looked and sounded fantastic. But ultimately, I just don't think it needed to exist.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Sharp Diamonds

Fun Accurate Detail: In the sandy beach room, whenever something inexplicably sinks into the sand, the sand around it gets all bubbly for a moment. This is a real thing, called fluidization! If you use jets to pump air into a body of sand, the sand behaves like a liquid, and objects will sink right into it!

[Note from Gabe in 2024: Since this review was written, I've seen the Director's Cut of this film, and surprisingly it addresses most (but not all) of the problems I had with the theatrical version. It does this by adding in a considerable amount of content that was apparently cut at the last minute, which really kind of makes it into a completely different film, but if you have the choice I would greatly recommend the Director's Cut over the theatrical cut.]