The good news is that you don’t need to have seen the first Escape Room movie to understand its sequel.

The bad news is that there are no winners in Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, including the audience.

Director Adam Robitel returns from the first movie, but this one is written by Will Honley, Maria Melnik, Daniel Tuch, and Oren Uziel. In this installment, six people unwittingly find themselves locked in another series of escape rooms, slowly uncovering what they have in common to survive, and discovering they’ve all played the game before. Zoe (Taylor Russell) and Ben (Logan Miller) are the sole survivors of the first movie, where they were pitted against the evil Minos Corporation which trapped them in a series of escape rooms, with each room deadly to anyone who failed to solve the elaborate puzzles within.

Zoe and Ben, still traumatized by their experiences in the first game, want justice for those murdered by Minos, but unfortunately no one believes their story. Zoe gets a lead on a location for Minos in New York City, and the two head for The Big Apple.

No sooner than they get there, though, they are re-routed to the subway and the car they are on is uncoupled from the train and stuck on a disused section of track. The six people on the car discover they are all survivors of Minos escape games and quickly conclude they are part of the titular “tournament of champions” – all survivors that Minos seemingly wants dead.

Thus begins the fun part of the movie. The survivors realize they have to solve a whole new set of puzzles, and they can only do it if they work together. The puzzles are ingenious and the stakes are high; the puzzles must be solved in a certain amount of time or else everyone is going to die in increasingly gruesome fashion.

Unfortunately, at around the midway point of the 88 minute film, the movie stops focusing on escape room-style puzzles. After one of the supposed victims in the first movie reappears, Zoe stops playing the games and focuses on finding her way out and on getting revenge.

When the movie swerves in this direction, it is much less engaging, and gives the viewer time to wonder who is behind the machinations of the shadowy Minos Corp., and why they spent so much time and money constructing elaborate and expensive deathtraps when it would be infinitely easier to just subtly kill off the handful of survivors. It honestly makes no sense, and it never will, even in the movie’s twist-ending coda.

The first Escape Room installment released in 2019 made $150 million on a $9 million dollar budget, so it was inevitable that there would be a sequel. This installment has been in theaters for two weeks and has grossed only $4 million over its production costs so far, so even though the filmmakers left the trap door open for a third trip to the escape room, the post-pandemic box office take may not warrant it. That may be just as well, though, as a trip to an actual escape room would surely be a lot more fun.