Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions arrives as the second installment in a franchise nobody demanded but plenty of people paid for, and it conducts itself with the grim efficiency of a machine built to do one thing. Six survivors of previous Minos games are gathered onto a subway car, then a bank vault, then a beach, then a phone booth in the rain, and dispatched in roughly that order. Adam Robitel directs with showmanship and no patience for anything that is not a trap. The puzzles are elaborate. The characters are not.

Taylor Russell returns as Zoey, carrying the film with a survivor's weariness that the screenplay barely deserves. The ensemble around her is integrated without ceremony: a trans actress, a Latina, a Black lead, a rotating cast of contestants defined entirely by the theme of their previous death game. This is ordinary post-2018 studio horror casting, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself for it, which is to its credit and also the whole of its social program. Deborah Ann Woll's Amanda Harper gets the film's one genuine dramatic turn, a coerced puzzle-maker whose daughter's diary supplies the emotional stakes, though the movie treats this revelation as another room to solve.

Minos remains a corporation with its fingers in the halls of power, and there is a faint whiff of contempt for the wealthy spectators who wager on the carnage, but this is franchise architecture, not an argument about anything. The acid rain falls because acid is lethal, not because the planet is dying. This is a body-count thriller with a cliffhanger ending and a sequel hook: competent, cheerfully stupid, and entirely uninterested in instructing anyone about how to live.