Escape Room: Tournament of Champions Extended Cut Review (Film, 2021) #31DaysOfHorror
content warning: blood, gore, violence against women, mental wellness
A few weeks ago, I discovered that there is a completely different version of Escape Room: Tournament of Champions. The Extended Cut features an entirely different beginning and ending that changes everything from tone to theme to plot. Now I loved the Theatrical Cut when I saw it, but what I saw of the Extended Cut made me commit to picking it up and reviewing it. The plan is clearly to keep making these films and I want to be prepared for when they choose one version over another to build from. They’re different enough that we don’t even know what combination of characters survived the story or even exist in the universe anymore.
The premise of the game is the same, with former champions thrown back into the competition. How the story gets there is entirely different. The original cut is clearly Zoey’s story, with her working through her trauma in therapy. The therapist doesn’t believe the game is real, but she does believe that Zoey needs to go to NYC—where Minos’ headquarters are—to confront her fears and heal.
Instead, the Extended Cut introduces three new characters straight away. In 2003, the Puzzle Master is working in his beautiful mansion. His wife and daughter arrive late in the night with bad news. She plans on leaving him and taking their daughter with him. He has a deadline to reach and asks for one hour to finish his work before they talk. His wife agrees and gets trapped in a deadly game built just for her. Meanwhile, their daughter is digging through a trinket box, playing with a lollipop, a seashell, and a plastic umbrella that become key to the game later on. Flash forward to the present and the daughter, Claire, is also a Puzzle Master. She is tasked by her father to find a way to kill Zoey through another game.
It’s an interesting approach to the story, making it clear that the chosen champions never had a chance to escape their second time in the game. A story of trauma and healing becomes one of desperation and vengeance. It’s a darker approach that better justifies some of the more desperate moves the players make in the game.
Claire and Zoey are set up as parallel figures, two bright young women who lost their mothers in childhood and are still dealing with the trauma. They’re forced into the game from two different sides. They could easily be friends if they met another way, but they’re adversaries by way of Minos’ game. Claire knows everything about Zoey, but Zoey doesn’t know a single thing about anyone who works at Minos.
The experience of seeing the Extended Cut after the Theatrical Cut is wild. There are 25 minutes of brand new footage in the film. The runtime is almost the same—the Extended Cut is seven minutes longer. That still means the equivalent of an act of the film is brand new. There are obvious continuity errors between the two versions, as Zoey and Ben have slightly different hairstyles between the two shoots. The cameras don’t match, either. The Extended Cut has super slick digital footage that almost flattens all the details, beauty filter-style, while the Theatrical Cut has a bigger depth of field and more rough edges. Simultaneously knowing and not knowing what is going to happen is very disorienting, especially in the brief moments where little extra slivers of footage find their way into otherwise unaltered scenes.
I think both versions are very good. The Extended Cut does feel like a wasted opportunity. Obviously, building and executing the stunts and effects of the escape rooms is the big part of the budget in these films. The story of Claire and her father designing the games is fascinating.
What happened here is the equivalent of taking the behind the curtain moments of Cube Zero and just reusing footage from Cube 2: Hypercube as the meat of the story. I want to see the film where Claire and her father pull out all the stops to make a game happen from the outside. I want the Cabin in the Woods story, not Hostel with bonus behind the scenes drama. Smashing these two scripts together means both stories cannot be canon and one will be entirely discarded when the third film is made.
Frankly, I look forward to that chaos when it happens. I can already hear the fights on social media as people argue over what actually happened in the second story and if the new film just changed things for no reason. The answer is yes and no. Bring popcorn. You’ll need it.
Escape Room: Tournament of Champions Extended Cut is available to purchase on all digital platforms.
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