The sequel to one of the many escape room-themed thrillers that came out between 2017 and 2019, Sony’s Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is not to be confused with Taskmaster: Champion of Champions – though it would be vastly improved if Alex Horne had designed the movie’s deadly challenges.

The 2021 film follows two survivors from the previous instalment (Taylor Russell and Logan Miller) who, like the audience, decide watching four people killed in a series of escape rooms wasn’t punishment enough, and go back to track down the puzzle-setting Minos Corporation – a surprisingly classical reference for a film which is essentially people yelling “Pick it up!” and “Put it back!” for 88 minutes.

They soon find themselves back in the game, this time with other “winners” of their respective death matches, including a priest (Thomas Cocquerel) who was the sole survivor of an all-priest escape room – which makes you wonder why we didn’t get to see that movie. He says he always asks himself “why God spared me”, instead of questioning why God tortured five devout priests to death in front of him.

What follows is more of the same inane, PG-13, effects-driven nonsense that boils down to watching people doing an elaborate escape room, which like so much game-based fiction is never as fun as playing it yourself. Eventually (spoiler alert) they discover that Minos is using previous, presumed-dead contestants to design the escape rooms, despite them having no relevant experience or expertise.

In spite of some solid CGI set pieces, the flick is dramatically inert because the characters are a few dimensions short of a Rubik’s Cube, and every time they think they have escaped into the real world they turn out to be in an even bigger escape room, scuppering every supposed twist. The result is effectively Saw without the gore, removing the only point of an entirely pointless premise.

It ends by setting up a sequel that never came, presumably because the world had moved on to the next fad. Bring on Sony’s Richard Osman’s House of Bubble Tea.