“Escape Room: Tournament of Champions” is nothing if not very fast-paced — it’s a movie that simply refuses to let you ponder what’s going on, because before you’re able to process a character’s death, for example, the film has already moved on to the next thing.
The “Escape Room” sequel catches up with Zoey (Taylor Russell) and Ben (Logan Miller) more or less where we left them: trying to live their lives while dealing with the trauma of their experiences in the first movie. Zoey is seeing a therapist who’s trying to get her to overcome her fear of flying — and who doesn’t seem to believe her story about the escape room.
But Zoey wants to face her fears a different way: by exposing Minos, the nebulous organization behind the deadly escape rooms. She convinces Ben to go to New York with her — by car, so we avoid the escape room from the very end of the last movie for now — and they investigate what looks a lot like the kind of place Minos would have an escape room, but now it’s empty.
So they take a ride on the subway from there, and it turns out their train car is an escape room. Everyone else there reveals they also survived a Minos room before — they realize this is the titular “tournament of champions.”
From there, things move so quickly that nobody, including the audience, will ever really have a chance to catch their breath. Characters die abruptly, sometimes even suspiciously. (While I was watching, I wasn’t sure if this was by design or if it was just the result of cutting the movie down to under 90 minutes, or some mixture thereof.)
Then we get to the ending. Ben is trapped in an airtight room that’s filling with water, and Zoey is confronted by Amanda (Deborah Ann Woll) — somehow still alive after apparently falling to her death in the upside down room in the first movie. She says Minos faked her death and then forced her to design this current game that Zoey is playing. And they want Zoey to design the next one, or they’ll kill Ben.
Zoey rejects the offer and manages, as always, to find a different way out. She, Ben and Amanda get out safely, manage to reach the cops — who give her a surprisingly quick report about how they’re already arresting Minos’ folks — and escape with their lives. Zoey is suspicious because it seems too easy. But Ben is adamant: this story is over, and it’s time to go home. Zoey decides to put a bow on things by taking a plane.
And now we finally get to the airplane escape room that we saw at the very end of the last movie. Though we don’t get to see how it plays out, because the movie ends with that reveal, and Zoey’s realization that everything that happened in New York was meant to get her to this point.
This ending invites so many questions. How many people does Zoey know who secretly work for Minos? Her therapist is a prime candidate because of how she basically demanded that Zoey take a flight at the beginning of the movie. Minos also used cues from that session, and a woman who looked exactly like the therapist from behind, let her know that the plane isn’t a normal flight. Is that because Minos was spying on Zoey, or was the therapist actually in on it?
Likewise, there’s reason to suspect Ben. In the flashback montage that we see as Zoey is realizing what’s going on with the plane, “Escape Room” reminds us how emphatic Ben was when he was trying to convince her that the whole thing was over. Is that just because he wanted so badly for it to be done with that he was deluding himself? Remember, he didn’t want any part of going after Minos — going home and pretending none of this ever happened is exactly the sort of approach he would take. But if he were Minos, he would also try to allay her fears so she would get on that plane.
And Amanda was key to the whole thing, and she certainly gave off a very suspicious vibe from the moment she appeared — like she was acting. Was that just nerves? Or was she playing a part beyond what she told Zoey? Could she actually be the mastermind behind this, or is it true that she was just another victim?
This is gonna be tough for us to parse until a hypothetical third movie comes out, so I went straight to the source for answers: “Escape Room: Tournament of Champions” director Adam Robitel.
The answer he gave, in short, is that there are no answers. Yet. While he does have plans for a third movie, those are subject to change — and for now, he thinks the ambiguity is part of the fun.
“The worst thing I think we could have done is, like, given everybody the answers,” Robitel told TheWrap.
“As much as people want to know, they don’t want to know. Like, as soon as you corporealize them and make them human, they become less scary.”