Escape Room 2: Tournament of Champions – 2021
I haven’t seen an escape room film in a while, but when this sequel – Tournament of Champions came along I knew I had to see it! It may be hard to keep track of all the similar movies of different quality, but this one is a sequel to the 2019 movie simply called Escape Room, a movie I considered to be really good and unpredictable. So how does the sequel Tournament of Champions hold up to the first film? Well, let us start at the beginning. In the first movie, we had a couple of survivors and we also learned that it was a multi-billion dollar industry creating the competitions. Not a hard conclusion to make considering all the rooms must have cost millions to design and create.
Anyway, the two survivors from the first movie are hell-bent on finding the corporation behind it all, expose them, and bring them to justice. Never mind that they’re risking their lives in doing so. I donät think that this is a very realistic approach. If I had survived such a challenge I would keep as far away from it as possible but that wouldn’t be a very exciting movie would it? So, they do seek out the organization but they’re actually waiting for them, getting them trapped in yet another game. They find themselves together with a few strangers but soon realize that all of them are former survivors from previous games. Hence Tournament of Champions, Best of the Best if you will.
We also get some background at the beginning of the film that will come in handy later but I can’t really go into that. Well, maybe I can. One of the room designers keeps his daughter locked in the basement from where she can’t escape. According to her, “everything is a game for him”. So there, I’ve given you everything I can without giving away too much.
The movie itself stays away from being too exciting though. I can’t really put my finger on it but there’s nothing really horrifying about it. Much of the traps and clues seem to be very similar to when it was in the first film. There’s no inventive spirit here. It seems that the scriptwriters took the easy way out most of the time. The acting is ok most of the time but we don’t really get a chance to care for the characters. When they die, and they will die, we just move on and don’t even care that we lost him or her. I think there were also way too few rooms and Tournament of Champions is a rare occasion where the movie would actually benefit from being longer. We needed more time to connect with the characters and see their problem-solving abilities. The main interest in these movies isn’t really about whether the people live or die. It’s about how clever the clues are.
As a whole, I guess it’s an ok flick, maybe even a little bit better than that. But I would have wanted more. I would have wanted it to be more exciting, more clever to have more suspense, and not to have a such far-fetched ending. But on the other hand. The future is wide open for another sequel!
