The first Escape Room movie was, well, fine. It had some good puzzles, a bunch of forgettable and generic characters played be semi-familiar actors, and a lot of bloodless deaths appropriate for a PG-13 horror movie. That was about it. There isn’t much to it, and it was probably ultimately forgettable. Keep in mind, too, I only finally saw the first movie in this franchise this past week. But it was a cheaply-made horror movie that did well enough to warrant a sequel.
Hey, guess what just came out. Why do you think, hypothetical reader, I decided to watch the first one in the first place?
After surviving the deadly escape rooms of the first movie, survivor Zoey Davis (Taylor Russell) is bound and determined to bring down the Minos group responsible for the death traps that killed most of her party in the first movie. She gets fellow survivor Ben (Logan Miller) to go with her to New York City to try and find some evidence of Minos’s wrongdoing. A quick chase of a pickpocket finds the pair on a subway car that is suddenly diverted. Apparently, the pair are in another deadly escape room, and the other four passengers in the car are also survivors of previous escape rooms. This batch includes former travel blogger Brianna (Indya Moore), disheartened priest Nathan (Thomas Cocquerel), initially abrasive Rachel (Holland Roden), and a guy Wikipedia tells me was named Theo (Carlito Olivero). These four all have more literal scars from their previous experience, with the subway car being set up as the first of a series of escape rooms.
What follows isn’t that different from the first movie. The group finds themselves in a series of rooms, and they don’t all get out of each room alive. Deaths are again rather bloodless, but that’s more or less fine as none of the new characters are any more memorable than they were in the first movie. If anything, they were less memorable. The first one had a stronger group of actors playing the thinly developed characters, and we got to spend a little bit of time with some of them before they entered the escape room. This time around, we didn’t get much of anything about the new characters, instead getting them to give a little about themselves here and there, but not much in terms of individual personality aside from Father Nathan since his behavior is sometimes…odd.
If anything, this movie relies a little too much on coincidence. Since Minos is as powerful as it appears to be, they can theoretically be anywhere. But how was it the six “players” all happened to be on the same train with no innocent bystanders to start the game? That’s never explained, and Father Nathan has these little moments that suggest he knows something more than he lets on, but if such is the case, the movie never really lets us know what that is. It doesn’t help that most of the bigger surprises were revealed in the movie’s various trailers, and given the movie doesn’t even clock in at a full 90 minutes, there isn’t much time to deal with anything like “character development”. It’s really hard to care about characters like Zoey when they really don’t have much of a personality.
The movie does seem to be attempting to expand the mythology of the world it is set in. I don’t know that it succeeds that way. About all it did was make me wonder how much of what was happening to Zoey, Ben, and the others wasn’t some sort of trick, something that the movie feints at at times but never really answers one way or the other. Then again, the movie is clearly setting up for a sequel, so perhaps the next one will reveal how much of what I saw here was yet another trick. I don’t think I’d be too much of a fan of that since, well, I might have seen it coming. If anything, this one looks like it was thrown together quickly, and whatever charm the first one had–and there wasn’t much–this one seemed to be pushing it a bit, creating a less memorable, more mediocre film as a result.
Grade: C-
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