Escape From L.A.
From AwardAnnals
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| Director(s) | John Carpenter |
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| Distributor | Paramount |
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| Kurt Russell reprises his role as Snake Plissken, of the near-future thriller Escape from New York, in this reworking of that film’s basic premise. Instead of New York being a maximum-security prison, this time it’s L.A., which through the agency of earthquakes has become an island of the damned. This penal colony is where the film’s future rulers, something very like the Moral Majority, send those deemed guilty of “moral crimes.” But something has gone wrong in this new moral order, because the President’s daughter has absconded to L.A. with a detonation… | |
Honors
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Amazon.com
Kurt Russell reprises his role as Snake Plissken, of the near-future thriller Escape from New York, in this reworking of that film’s basic premise. Instead of New York being a maximum-security prison, this time it’s L.A., which through the agency of earthquakes has become an island of the damned. This penal colony is where the film’s future rulers, something very like the Moral Majority, send those deemed guilty of “moral crimes.” But something has gone wrong in this new moral order, because the President’s daughter has absconded to L.A. with a detonation device, and Snake is commandeered to retrieve it. The film’s dark dystopia, with its satrical elements taking aim at our dwindling freedoms, and the eclipsing of democracy by narrow interests, are more the subject this time. As a result the action suffers, and the plot devices are sometimes weak and predictable. But just below the surface there is a coiled Snake ready to strike. Steve Buscemi’s performance as a weasely hawker of L.A. tour maps is a standout, and the presence of Peter Fonda and Pam Grier adds to the fun. In fact, just the sight of Fonda surfing down the flooded corridor of Sunset Boulevard is reason enough to check this movie out. —Jim Gay
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Fifteen years after John Carpenter squandered a great idea on a mediocre movie (Escape from New York), he does it again—this time on the Left Coast. Kurt Russell is back as the terminally cynical one-eyed action hero Snake Plissken who, this time, has been coerced into saving the world in Los Angeles. It’s 2013 and L.A. is now an island maximum-security prison off the coast of California. Snake has 10 hours to find a doomsday weapon that’s fallen into the hands of revolutionaries before he dies of a virus with which he’s been injected. But the action is clumsy and unimaginative: lots of shootouts and very little suspense. Even the bad guys aren’t particularly inventive; only Pam Grier, as a transsexual gang leader, strikes any sparks. Russell growls his way through the role but can only blame himself: He cowrote the script with Carpenter. —Marshall Fine
