88 min | PG-13 | July 16, 2021 | Columbia Pictures
The survivors of the first murder room get pulled back in, this time onto a New York subway car rigged to kill. Minos runs a championship bracket of past winners, and the prize is staying alive. The puzzles are clever. The people solving them are not.
Zoey Davis and Ben Miller survived one round of Minos Escape Rooms and now want the company shut down. A trip to Manhattan drops them onto a sealed subway car with four strangers. Every one of them won a previous game. The rooms in this tournament kill faster and reset harder, and the corporation watches the whole thing for sport. This is a film about a death trap built by people who want to study how prey behaves, and that idea stays more interesting than the bodies moving through it.
Taylor Russell plays Zoey as the only character with an inner life. She reads trauma as data and solves rooms by treating panic as a problem to manage. Logan Miller plays Ben as the loyal everyman who exists to ask the question the room needs answered out loud. Indya Moore plays Brianna and Holland Roden plays Rachel with enough conviction to register before the script reduces them to puzzle functions. Deborah Ann Woll plays Amanda with a wary competence that the film abandons too early. The cast commits. The writing keeps the people thin so the rooms can stay thick.
Adam Robitel directs the set pieces as the actual stars. A subway car that electrifies on contact and a bank lobby that floods with acid rain show real engineering in the production design. The script by Will Honley, Maria Melnik, Daniel Tuch, and Oren Uziel treats each room as a sequence of timed gates and routes the dialogue toward exposition that explains the gate. The editing cuts on the click of every solved mechanism, which builds momentum and flattens dread into rhythm. The camera loves the architecture of the traps and forgets to fear them.
The result is a competent machine that runs its premise without deepening it. The rooms escalate in design while the stakes stay flat, because the film never makes you believe these specific people can lose. Russell holds it together by playing a survivor who has learned that surviving is its own kind of damage. The movie has that thread in its hands and pulls instead toward the next gimmick. It is a sequel that builds bigger boxes and forgets to put anything inside them.