BEFORE: Come on, this one's a no-brainer - any time I get a chance to watch a film AND its sequel back-to-back, I'm going to take it. There was a voice actor who appeared in the first four "The Purge" movies (but not the fifth for some reason) and I took advantage of that. EIGHT actors carry over from "Escape Room", some in flashback scenes, obviously. But I'll just focus on Nik Dodani, who played "Danny, the Escape Room expert", here and the others are listed below. This kind of thing just makes my process that much easier.
Now I"m wondering if I can find a path that connects franchises like "Final DestinatIon" and the "Saw" films, because maybe one October I can program those films in. Not this year, my dance card for October is already full. But there's always next year and the year after that, if I can keep it going.
THE PLOT: Six people unwillingly find themselves locked in another series of escape rooms, slowly uncovering what they have in common to survive. After joining forces, they soon discover they've all played the game before.
AFTER: After all the flashbacks are done (they practically repeat the plot of the WHOLE first movie at the start of this sequel), and then play the last five minutes again, in which Zoey and Ben decide to travel to NYC and search for the secret headquarters of Minos ("Your Leader in Custom-Designed Deadly Escape Room Experiences"...) because OF COURSE every company hides their HQ's latitude and longitude coordinates in their logo, right?
But then some screenwriter must have realized, wait, isn't Zoey afraid to fly on a plane, because her mother died in that plane crash after they backpacked across Vietnam, and Zoey was stuck in a broken fuselage under her mother's lifeless body for a WEEK before she got rescued? Well, we've sure written ourselves into a corner, now, haven't we? How can we possibly get her and Ben to NYC if she won't get on a plane? Wait, some people drive from Chicago to New York, don't they? Never mind, problem solved.
If you watched the first film closely, you might have noticed some Minos operatives testing out an escape room that WAS a plane, or at least looked and felt like a plane. So it's possible that they were going to use this on Zoey, and her phobia accidentally allowed her to outsmart them. Nice. It's nice to see fear work in somebody's favor for once, because I think this is why we have phobias - the fear of heights, the fear of sharks, the fear of clowns, these are REAL dangers, and avoiding them can keep you alive. (Prove me wrong - John Wayne Gacy. Right?)
So a plane can be an escape room, and when our heroes get to New York, they learn that a subway car can be an escape room, too. Or a bank, or a city street. And Zoey's therapist said that her issue is that she sees escape rooms everywhere - but that's only because they ARE everywhere, just how much money and power does this Minos Corporation have? They somehow managed to arrange things so that four OTHER Escape Room champions/survivors would be on the SAME subway car at the SAME time. And of course, it's the "Q" train, as in Q for "question"? And that question is, "Would you like to play a game?" Sorry, I think that one is from "Wargames".
Of course, these things are seemingly impossible - so is getting one subway car to de-couple from the train and drive itself to the end of the line. So is electrifying the whole car so lightning bolts are spraying everywhere, and that whole set-up with the tokens and the hand-bars and a lot of other mechanics in this film - but why let reality get in the way of telling the story? For me, this counts as a NITPICK POINT though: They should have known that wasn't a real subway car because there was a recorded announcement about not leaving any items on the train, and reporting any found items to subway personnel. And the recording was concise, clear and they could understand every word. That, on a NYC subway car, is not just unlikely, it's flat-out impossible.
From there, the new team has to make their way through a bank set-up with a deadly laser security system, unlock a safe and make their way across a booby-trapped tile floor. Then there's a picture-postcard like beach set-up (Coney Island?) with a miniature lighthouse, a telescope and a beach-house with a suspicious refrigerator. Again there's a room that simply MUST be inside, but has all the appearance of being outside, some kind of VR mixed with forced perspective scenery must be at work, or just plain old movie magic. Then there's a complicated NYC street scene, complete with a taxi cab, a phone booth (there hasn't been one of those in NYC for years, though) and stores that are, of course, never open when you need them to be. (Yep, that's NYC.)
Finally, there's a child's bedroom and (no spoilers here) this does relate to some stuff from the first film, and gives a possible hint to where this storyline could go next. The Minos Corporation is so impressed with how Zoey plays the game that they want her to design more escape rooms for them. In fact, they insist on it, and they'll kill everyone she cares about unless she agrees.
I think with this little plot twist, I kind of cracked the code on what's going on here. This second film in the franchise is a metaphor for, well, franchise films made in Hollywood. When you think about it, a movie set is really just a giant form of an Escape Room - the director, cast and crew spend countless hours, days, even WEEKS in the same studio room, which is, much like an escape room, 100% completely fake. And the cast and crew have to work together to complete the film so they can then what? LEAVE the studio. And when a director makes a movie that's a big hit and does well at the box office, what does the studio do? They make him (or her) make a sequel. So it's back into the locked room with the same people from before, maybe a few new ones, and once again, the goal is to finish the film, put the right pieces together so they all can leave and get back to their lives.
If you make a good film, what does that get you? Just the right to make another one. So these "winners" of the escape rooms, they get to move on to the Tournament of Champions? And where does this all end? That's up to the public, really, they vote with their wallets and whatever they go to see more of, Hollywood's going to make more of, it's a vicious little cycle. So I no longer wonder why so many actors try to transition to directing and producing, because in the long run, it's better to be the one designing the "escape rooms" than to be the people who are stuck in them for weeks at a time. Or they could just give up show business, but that's crazy talk, right? Zoey, you should totally take that job at Minos - what better way to change the system then from within? JK.
Of course, I've spent 30 years now working in independent film production - so as Zoey's therapist said, if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. Maybe that's why these escape rooms seem to me to be a metaphor for moviemaking. This is another film that played at the AMC in the summer of 2021, when I was working there - so I had seen a few scenes like the beach room, but of course they didn't make any sense to me until I saw them in the context of the whole film. But according to Wikipedia, there are really two different edits of this film, a longer version reveals who the puzzle-master is and a bit about his back-story. I sure didn't see that, so I must have recorded the original version off of cable. But if they ever make a third film, it's now a bit confusing with regards to where the plot should go next. '
Really, the second film feels like a big step backwards, and the first one made so much profit that come on, they should have really had the money to go for it here. But there's not even much of a back-story for the new characters playing the game, and they seemed to hire the absolute cheapest actresses they could find, with no credits and very little experience or acting ability. One actress was impossible for me to understand, and that's why I usually prefer to watch movies on streaming or cable with the subtitles on. Jeez, it's important for an actress to be believable, but it's even more important for her to be, you know, understood. Like say your lines clearly, how hard is that? And if she can't do that, can't she be replaced?
Also starring Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Jamie-Lee Money, (all FOUR carrying over from "Escape Room"), Thomas Cocquerel (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Holland Roden, Indya Moore, Carlito Olivero, Matt Esof, Lucy Newman-Williams (last seen in "Everest"), Scott Coker (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Renee Harbek, Evan Hengst, Anton David Jeftha, Corin Silva.
with archive footage of Tyler Labine, Jay Ellis, Yorick van Wageningen (all THREE carrying over from "Escape Room")
RATING: 4 out of 10 conveniently timed news reports
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