Escape Room: Tournament of Champions

Directed by Adam Robitel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions follows Taylor Russell’s Zoey and Logan Miller’s Ben as they’re once again forced to participate in a series of deadly, trap-laden escape rooms. It’s perhaps not surprising to discover that Escape Room: Tournament of Champions comes off as a perpetually erratic endeavor that’s often as tedious as it is entertaining, as the movie, saddled with a somewhat episodic structure, has been suffused with an almost equal number of effective and underwhelming set-pieces – with, in terms of the latter, the characters’ exploits aboard an electrified subway car hardly able to generate the kind of suspense and tension for which Robitel is obviously striving. There’s little doubt, then, that the picture benefits from its uniformly affable performances and smattering of admittedly enthralling sequences (eg the surviving characters attempt to find their way out of a bank adorned with deadly lasers), and it’s clear, too, that the inclusion of a few unexpected plot developments within the third act, especially the return of a presumed-dead character, ensure that the picture concludes on a decidedly positive note. The end result is a hit-and-miss effort that generally falls right in line with its equally-passable predecessor, although one could certainly do much, much worse as far as PG-13 horror flicks go (to put it mildly).

**1/2 out of ****