Film Round-Up: Cinderella, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions and Extinct

A Guy Who Talks About Movies
3 min readNov 29, 2021

Let’s talk about more films!

Cinderella

Camilla Cabello is Cinderella in this jazzed up version of the fairytale which is also a music. There is a line in bad films where they turn into so bad it’s good movies. No one knows where it is, but it is a magical line which can turn a wretched evening into a great night. This is one of those films that dances all over the line and leaves you confused. A musical which sees a group of fancily dressed ladies sing What A Man when Prince Charming enters only for the Prince to counter with a mixed up version of Seven Nation Army must surely realise that it isn’t going to be high art. The script skirts being awful to awfully hilarious and that makes this film very hard to rate. I definitely enjoyed watching it because of the bizarre choices it makes at times and the sheer enthusiasm it has even when making mistakes. But I think I enjoyed it in the wrong way, like how Eddie the Eagle gets the love over every other ski jumper in the world.

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions

Zoey and Ben investigate the mysterious Minos Corporation behind the killer escape rooms only to find themselves back in the trap once again. You know this series has no faith in itself when the first ten minutes are a recap of what happened in the first one. And it is right to have no faith in itself because it is rubbish. It merely repeats the first film with very little new to offer in a film so lacking in imagination that even the dowdiest of bureaucrats would want things livening up a bit. I think it’s trying to fit in the niche of the Final Destination series where the appeal is in how people get killed, but the deaths are poor and underwhelming. It’s just a complete waste of everyone’s time and a sequel that no one ever wanted or asked for us.

Extinct

Op and Ed accidentally go forward in time to find out that all of their species are now extinct. Extinct opens by introducing a blue footed booby. The booby repeats its species name like it’s a Pokemon and frustratingly, you probably will giggle at the most immature joke you can imagine. That is amazingly the highlight of a by the numbers animated film. You have characters you’ve seen a million times before in a plotline you have seen a million times before. This is about as standard and boilerplate as you’d expect. That doesn’t make it dreadful. The film hits its beats fairly well and it never really does anything that awful. It also has the good grace to be done after 80 minutes, which I respect. It is rather naff, but it’s not offensively naff.

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A Guy Who Talks About Movies

Former Head of Movies for Screen Critics. Film Reviews now hosted on Medium.