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Escape room film series7/2/2023 ![]() In the first movie, director Adam Robitel ( Insidious: The Last Key), who returned for this sequel, makes the introduction of each room special. The rooms these characters are trapped in are the real stars of this series. But they’re soon lured into another set of deviously designed rooms, where they’re joined by other survivors from previous games for a “tournament of champions.” The pair travel to New York to confront Minos, the company behind the escape rooms. Tournament of Champions follows Zoey ( Waves’ Taylor Russell, the brightest and most charming actor in the movie) and Ben ( Love, Simon’s Logan Miller), two surviving characters from the original movie. Instead, the sequel abandons clever mysteries in favor of more straightforward action-horror, losing some of what made the original special in the process. ![]() So the newly released sequel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, seemed like the perfect opportunity for smarter contestants and more devious traps. The movie is full of puzzles for viewers to guess along with, and while they may never anticipate the solutions, there are always enough clues to make guessing fun. This seems like the ideal way to watch 2019’s Escape Room, a relentlessly enjoyable movie about people trying to survive a series of deadly escape rooms. No one was ever right, but whoever got closest would be spared a drink. But predictable story beats and the movie's extreme reliance on suspension of disbelief keep Escape Room from rising too high above the genre.A friend of mine once played a drinking game with Christopher Nolan’s 2000 reverse-order mystery movie Memento, where he would pause the movie at the start of each scene, and a group of friends who’d never seen it would try to guess exactly what would happen next. There's some fun to be had, a few laughs, and a reasonable amount of tension throughout, with only a few jumping-out-of-the-cupboard startle scares. Escape Room is tailored for a younger audience, and it's certainly not as ugly as the gorier franchise - and, thankfully, it has less of that series' bitter, faux moralistic overtones. Plus, with its ultra-elaborate traps and unlikely amount of insider knowledge about the players, the movie can't "escape" comparisons to the much more violent, much crueler torture-porn franchise Saw. ![]() Its 10 Little Indians structure (picking off characters one at a time) and standard moral compass prevent the story from delivering significant surprises. And some are so implausible that they're likely to shake viewers out of the film. Some traps allow viewers to think along others require information we're not given. Some of the characters are drawn in detail, while others are thumbnail sketches leaning toward cliché. But the movie is inconsistent in just about every other way. And some of the performances, including Russell's sympathetic lead work, are good. Production designer Edward Thomas ( Doctor Who) is the MVP. ![]() The most fun parts of Escape Room are the occasional solvable puzzle and the detail and imagination in the sets. This horror film/thriller has its virtues, but it badly strains viewers' suspension of disbelief and can't avoid feeling like Saw with duller teeth.
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