Another month...another John Carpenter flick to rewatch. There's no way to talk about Escape From L.A. without talking about Carpenter's 1981 classic original Escape From New York. The sequel is practically a remake anyway, with the President's daughter standing in for the big man himself, Cuban freedom fighter Cuervo Jones replacing The Duke Of New York as the city ruler and an E.M.P aiming device now utilised as the reason for the urgent escape. Oh, and a manufactured virus replacing the explosive in the neck which forces anti-hero Snake Plissken to act on the government's behalf.
Given New York's limited budget, 15 years of technological advancement plus a much bigger budget should have made Escape From L.A. a bigger, more accomplished follow up, if not necessarily a better film. But it's not any of these things. In every possible way, the sequel is inferior to the superior original. Cinematographer Gary Kibbe's flat, insipid photography combined with Shirley Walker's misjudged score drains any of the atmosphere this film might have had. It's just a poorly strung together selection of wacky situations that Snake finds himself in. While they're all quite cool in their own way (Beverley Hills plastic surgery freaks/ the coliseum basketball game to-the-death/ surfing the tsunami through central L.A.) each scene is let down by shoddy acting (Cliff Robertson, Stacey Keach and George Corraface are poor substitutes for Lee Van Cleef, Donald Pleasence and Isaac Hayes), catatonic editing (will somebody wake me up after the motorcycle chase) and some of the worst effects in a recent mainstream film (the chopper and the nuclear sub look CGI...no attempts been made to make them appear, or move, realistically).
On the plus side...and it's a major plus...it has Kurt Russell returning as war hero/criminal Snake Plissken...one of the greatest characters ever to grace a movie screen. He might be channelling Eastwood, but who cares, because it's refreshing to see a character shoot first...and not give a shit (George Lucas, please take note).
Thanks to Russell we're able to navigate the choppy plot and arrive at the ballsy ending. A reworking of New York's downer twist, L.A. ups Snake's bluff to deliver catastophic global consequences. But the real beauty is...Snake still doesn't care!
Terribly flawed, predictably derivative and bordering on the amateurish Escape From L.A. isn't a Carpenter film to recommend. But the film contains enough barmy ideas, enough of Russell's legendary performance and a fraction of the style that is John Carpenter to make this a beer and popcorn, Friday night, escapist treat, once in a while.
1 comment:
Love Escape from New York. Love Snake. Love (good) Carpenter. Never liked this.
To me Escape from LA always felt like a slap in the face seeing as how Carpenter and Russell were given a sizable budget (in 1996) of $50m then creamed most of it off for themselves and spent about a tenner on the actual film...and made it look and play worse than the original which was made for probably less than the catering budget of this one. The story is lazy and unexciting, the fx awful and the acting atrocious. The only saving grace is Russell as Snake and THAT ending. Even so I'll stick to escaping from New York.
Post a Comment