Movie Review: Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)

Synopsis: Still angry and traumatized by the "soul survivor" escape rooms she survived; Zoey Davis convinces fellow survivor Ben Miller to travel with her to New York in search of proof so people will stop thinking she's crazy and the mysterious Minos Corporation will be held accountable. However, her and Ben soon learn it is all a trap and they are once-again forced to escape a series of deadly rooms, this time with help from other former "champions."

Who's in it? The movie stars Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Holland Roden and Indya Moore.

Review: I added this movie to my library a few days ago but was on the fence about whether or not I wanted to watch it. This is mostly the result of me not being a huge fan of the first movie, both because it seemed a bit farfetched and because it relied heavily on characters who made bad decisions despite having a lot of time to figure things out.

However, the movie was just short enough to be watched in the limited amount of time we had after work/making dinner, so I wound up choosing it. My expectations were lowered but, as it turns out, it was actually a better movie than expected.

I think the one thing I liked about this film versus the previous movie is it does a much better job of creating a sense of urgency for the reluctant contestants. The previous film gave the players a whole lot of time to figure things out (which made their inability to do so much more of an indictment on them than the Minos Corporation). In this movie, the rooms had a much firmer time limit and, just to make things a little more interesting, were rigged with traps that could kill any of them at any time.

The fact they were all former survivors also added a little something extra to the movie because it at least gave the impression any of the players would have a chance of surviving. To be truthful, there were still one or two that were a bit hard to believe as former winners, making me wonder just how much luck had to do with their survival. However, I still found I liked this group of escape room contestants a lot better than the group in the first film.

I do feel like the movie's ending could have been considerably better. While I liked what the film was attempting to do, it wasn't overly difficult to figure out the "surprise" twist at the end, both because I knew it was unlikely this would be the last movie in the series and because the previous film already gave us a sneak preview. It would have been better for the movie to have done something completely different and saved this ending for whatever the final film happens to be.

Final Opinion: The ending definitely could have been better but, at least in my opinion, this sequel was an improvement over the original and I did enjoy watching it overall. 

My Grade: B+