As someone who loved the first movie, I was super pumped for Escape Room: Tournament of Champions. The director of the first movie, Adam Robitel (check out also his Insidious: The Last Key) returned as did main actors, Logan Miller and Taylor Russel, along with Deborah Ann Wolf. I must admit, I did prefer the first movie, but this was still a fun watch and I like how it expanded the lore and left things open for a third movie.
How to Stream or Download Escape Room: Tournament of Champions
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The Movie Review
The movie sees, Zoey and Ben trying to move on with their lives after surviving the last escape room. Ben is having an easier time with moving on than Zoe and he just wants to forget things. Zoey on the other hand wants to bring Minos down and has coordinates that she thinks are their HQ in New York City.
It does not take long for Ben and Zoe to end up in another elaborate escape room setup by Minos. I have to say the way Ben and Zoe get tricked into the first new escape room is pretty damn awesome and very clever. They end up on a subway train with other survivors of previous escape rooms.
I thought it was pretty cool how the movie expanded the world of Escape Room here. Each survivor talks about the game they survived and what the “gimmick” was, for example, one talks about how all the people in their escape room were priests. This certainly got my imagination running and made me wonder just how big this corporation of Minos really was!
While there are new survivors, Ben and Zoe are 100 percent the main characters. They and the other survivors have to survive a few very cleverly designed escape rooms. What I liked was how the curtain was pulled back a bit and we found out more about Minos and how these escape rooms were created. It was pretty mind-blowing stuff and it was something I thought was handled very well.
At the end of the day, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is not going to win you over if you did not like the first movie. However, I had a really fun time with this, I thought the elaborate escape rooms were very well done and the expanded lore was something that I really did enjoy.
The main thing that made me not enjoy this movie quite as much as the first was Zoe. I liked Zoe in the first movie, but here there was something kind of off about her. I cannot put my finger on what, but I think the way she pressured Ben may be what made me not root for her as much as I was in the first movie.
I certainly think that Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is well worth a watch. I would recommend that you watch the first movie again before this one as if you watch them back-to-back it is a pretty cool experience. If you have not seen the first, do not watch this as you are missing out on a great deal and will probably not really get much out of the movie.
