ESCAPE ROOM MOVIE SERIES
Still, moving at lightning speed has its benefits when you’re wading through a high-concept gauntlet that punishes you if you try to advance too quickly.Ī clunky, but effectively mean rug-pull finale suggests that the “Escape Room” movies, like the “ Saw” series before them, was always secretly about its characters. “Escape Room: Tournament of Champions” also moves so fast from one set piece to the next that it’s easy to forgive its filmmakers for mostly covering and therefore over-editing their footage. The key word being “could” since not knowing what will happen next is also a good part of this movie’s tension. And if you miss a step, don’t stick together, or simply don’t move fast enough-you could die. Unfortunately, the game-players’ forward-thinking doesn’t necessarily guarantee their success since, more often than not, Minos’ reluctant contestants move or think slower than they need to. This leads to some appropriately melodramatic dialogue exchanges and a few impetuous judgment calls, like when alcoholic tough guy Nathan ( Thomas Cocquerel) muscles his way through a laser-beam-protected escape room (designed to look like a bank’s lobby) even though he doesn’t understand the clues that will help him to find a safe path out of the room.Įventually, Zoey and her friends try, and fail to get a step ahead of Minos’ games. So Zoey and Ben team-up with a new group of survivors, each one of whom is just as on edge as they are. Hence the “Tournament of Champions” title, which is thankfully never dwelled upon. They travel to Manhattan together, where they’re soon locked inside a booby-trapped Q train with three other escape room survivors. Zoey and Ben’s respective motives are simple enough: she wants to find and punish whoever’s behind Minos’ escape rooms while he wants to repay her for saving his life in the last movie. By contrasting the movie’s resourceful adolescent contestants with their invisible tormentors, the makers of “Escape Room: Tournament of Champions” not only hit the ground running, but also set the stage for a sequel that’s almost as nasty as it needs to be. Compare that sort of rat-in-a-maze mentality with the inhuman and largely implied motives of the Minos Escape Rooms corporation, a generically clandestine organization whose members are blessedly never represented beyond a negligible prefatory flashback. Survival is everything to Zoey and her teammates, and when they do have enough time to out-think a puzzle, that extra wiggle room usually trips them up worse than any death-trap could. Best of all, Zoey and Ben’s PTSD-like trauma is mostly processed through the escape rooms’ steadily escalating puzzles instead of their own pouty, leaden dialogue.
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