The Escape From New York & L.A. Page - A Tribute to Snake Plissken

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Austin Chronicle [Aug 09/1996/US] By Marc Savlov

It's been 15 years since Carpenter's futuristic cowboy-noir archetype Snake Plissken [Russell] unpenned the President from the New York City Maximum Security Prison, but then as Snake himself liked to note, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Of course, there have been a few minor revisions to the United States since then: The "Big One" finally hit California, decimating Los Angeles and leaving the city and its environs less than landlocked, Donald Pleasance's position as President has been filled by the bible-thumping histrionics of an apparently de-lobed Cliff Robertson, and the resultant political climate has left the country a theocratic police state. Citizens convicted of moral crimes [pre-marital sex, smoking, eating red meat, voting Democratic, etc.] are packed off to the island of Los Angeles where they are left to fend for themselves against the roving gangs and genuine psychotics that litter the island like so much post-quake detritus. On top of all this, the President's daughter, Utopia, has turned seditious, absconding with a "black box" weapons system and hijacking Air Force One to L.A. where she's joined forces with rebel leader Cuervo Jones [Corraface]. Tough break. Enter Snake Plissken, newly captured by the United States Police Force. Given a choice between death in 10 hours via a particularly virulent form of neurotoxin, or going along with the President's plan to recapture the stolen weapon and kill Utopia, the ever-perspicacious Plissken opts for the latter and Escape From L.A. is off like a shot. For those who have seen Carpenter's original film, nothing much has really changed - different coast, different MacGuffin, but still an almost identical story line. Once in Los Angeles, Snake makes his way through the various ruined tourist attractions toward his rendezvous with Utopia and Cuervo. Along the way, he meets up with a number of the local flora and fauna, among them Steve Buscemi as the conniving "Map to the Stars" Eddie, rival ganglord Hershe [Grier], and the [literally] twisted Surgeon General of Beverly Hills [Sam Raimi regular Campbell]. Still, familiarity doesn't necessarily breed contempt, and fans of the New York leg of the Snake saga will slip back into the desperado's world with a comfortable grin. Carpenter keeps the pace moving at roughly the speed of sound, and his dark wry wit is evident throughout. Above it all, though, is Russell's inimitably sexy Snake, so unchanged between films it seems as though it's only been a long Labor-Day weekend since the A-Number-One Duke of New York got his. To be brutally honest, the City of Angels doesn't completely pack the gritty punch that the Big Apple did, but then Green Day aren't the Ramones, either. Suffice to say, Plissken's jaunt westward is true to Carpenter's [and producer/co-writer Debra Hill's] original spirit. Loud, rollicking, alternately ultra-violent and hilarious, Escape From L.A. is Snake redux, and what more do you need, really?

Variety [Aug 12/1996/US] By Todd McCarthy

A cartoonish, cheesy and surprisingly campy apocalyptic actioner, John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is spiked with a number of funny and anarchic ideas, but doesn't begin to pull them together into a coherent whole. Designed principally to return Kurt Russell's violence-prone Snake character to the screen after a 15-year layoff and to gain maximum mileage out of the public's delight in seeing the worst possible fate visited upon SoCal, this serving of sloppy seconds will score its biggest hit with teenage boys. Paramount should look to make a quick getaway with as much B.O. booty as possible from potent openings, as staying power looks meager.

When last seen, Snake was spiriting the U.S. prez out of a New York City that was an armed fortress controlled by convicts and loonies, circa 1998. Westward migration being what it is, by 2013 all the degenerates are in L.A., part of which has broken off from the mainland courtesy of a 9.8 earthquake in the year 2000.

In fact, five-minute expositional prologue is packed with enough juicy info and described incident that one wishes Carpenter had shot that and dispensed with the aftermath. In somewhat facetious fashion, the audience is informed that , in the wake of the quake, the nation's undesirables have all been sequestered on L.A. Island as a means of purifying the new "moral" United States, which is lorded over by a Gestapo-like U.S. Police Force and ruled by right-wing religious hypocrite Cliff Robertson, who has declared himself President for Life.

But the prexy's goody-goody daughter has suddenly seen through her old man, absconded with his top-secret "black box" and joined forces with gangster revolutionary Cuervo Jones [George Corraface], who is about to lead a massive uprising of the dispossessed and the merely unwashed against the fascistic Establishment. Former war hero and full-time bad boy Snake Plissken is pulled out of mothballs to retrieve the black box and, while he's at it, eliminate the president's turncoat sprig.

Pic's first sort-of-groovy sequence has Snake being spirited in a mini-submarine from prison to the island. Along the way, he passes just above various familiar, but submerged, freeways and city landmarks, most notably Universal Studios, but the geography underwater makes no more sense than it eventually does above ground. Snake's odyssey could have been much more amusing had it been specifically rooted on the map.

As it is, upon landing, Snake first meets an old surf bum [Peter Fonda], who lies in wait of the awesome wave he just knows will roll in when another big earthquake hits. When his forecast is fulfilled, Snake is there to ride it in with him, but, like the underwater journey, the trip is too short, and too tacky visually, to make the hoped-for major impact.

Stealing into Hollywood in the most realistic section of the film, Snake maneuvers through assorted skinheads, hookers and leather-clad scenesters in his effort to track down Cuervo, which he must do before some injected poison takes hold in eight hours. He comes close, but is instead captured and taken to the L.A. Coliseum to star in an updated Roman-style life-and-death contest.

This sequence sums up in a nutshell what's wrong with the picture. To deliver its full conceptual potential, the stadium should have been jammed with 100,000 crazed former Raiders fans clamoring for Snake blood. Instead, what looks to be about 35 bikers hoping for a little beer money are spread thinly around part of the stands. Where is digital magic when we really need it? A great portion of the crowd at the Ben-Hur chariot race was an illusion, but no one noticed. Why such a poor turnout here?

After a tough victory in the arena and further skirmishes elsewhere, Snake gets his hands on both the president's daughter and the black box; latter turns out to be a control mechanism capable of shutting down all electronic power on Earth. After a final confrontation between Snake and the duplicitous president, the fate of the world is left in Snake's hands, and anarchic ending reps one of the film's few genuine gratifications.

With eye patch firmly in place and tongue partly in cheek, Russell hoarse-whispers his way through the picture, knocking off a seemingly limitless supply of bad apples along the way. If not for him, this would be a B movie all the way. Effort appears as though it was done very much on the cheap, with the countless matte shots, mock-ups, models, haphazard special effects and dingy lighting schemes bringing to mind the look of late-'60s Euro co-productions. Visually, item is much closer to the 1981 Escape From New York than to effects-oriented pics being done today.

Nocturnal setting, uneven tone, abrasive score and only fitfully successful attempts at humor create a generally grim atmosphere, occasionally leavened by goofy ideas and flashes of explosive action. Aside from Russell, no one is onscreen for very long, although appearances of note are put in by Steve Buscemi as Cuervo's fast-talking, two-faced agent and blaxploitation stalwart Pam Grier, her voice somehow altered to portray a renegade transsexual gang leader.

Tucson Weekly [Aug 15/1996/US] By Stacy Richter

Escape From L.A., the latest from John Carpenter [The Thing, Halloween, etc.], is utterly without any redeeming moral values in the conventional sense. True to the title, it's pure escapist schlock in the grand tradition of the B-movie. It's got all the drive-in movie goodies: bizarre characters, over-the-top acting, cheesy special effects, slutty costumes and gallons of blood. The only thing this movie wants is for us to have a good time without guilt, and since the heat has immobilized the intellect of most Tucsonans anyway, why resist? Yes, it's a vapid, cheesy movie with plot holes you could drive a truck through. Yes, it's exciting and funny and sort of great.

Escape From L.A. is a reprise of Carpenter's 1981 Escape From New York: To call it a sequel wouldn't make much sense, since the two are so alike. In Escape From New York, Snake Plisskin [Kurt Russell, all young and buff] is sent into New York in the futuristic hell of 1997. The rotten Big Apple has been converted to a penal colony without keepers or guards; prisoners are dumped there and left to their own wicked devices. Snake, a criminal himself, is sent on a suicide mission to rescue the President, whose plane has crashed there.

Escape From L.A. works with the same elements but shuffles them around: It's the 21st century and the Big One has plunged some of California into the ocean, leaving L.A. an island. Moral degeneracy, rather than crime, qualifies even children for incarceration on the island. [These crimes, never directly specified, seem to include smoking cigarettes, eating beef and being Muslim.] Kurt Russell, grizzled and buff, goes on a suicide mission to retrieve a doomsday device hijacked by the President's flake of a daughter, Utopia [A.J. Langer]. Similarities abound. In the first Escape, Snake is injected with timed intravenous explosives. In the second, he's injected with a timed virus. In both, the baddest bad guy drives a funny car with a disco ball, sinful prisoners sport eighties punk rock attire, and portions of dialogue are repeated word for word.

All this leaves Escape From L.A. with a major dilemma: If it's so close to prequel, what's the point? The answer seems to be, there is no point. Escape From L.A. is gloriously pointless. It's completely redundant. There's very little difference between renting Escape From New York and going to the theater to see Escape From L.A. My guess is that John Carpenter figured he could capture a whole new generation of viewers who weren't out of diapers the first time around.

That's not to say there aren't differences between the two versions. The first Escape capitalizes on the Cold War fear of nuclear apocalypse. The second is lighter and more ironic--it capitalizes on the fear of ecological degradation and the dangers of militant non-smokers. The first has gritty sets of a decaying New York. The second has a party atmosphere, with glittery sets of the decaying Santa Monica freeway, half-dead vampiric Californians craving plastic surgery and aging surfers riding tsunamis.

As dumb and enjoyable as Escape From L.A. is, the truth is, Escape From New York is a better movie. It's darker, bleaker, and has the force of originality to propel it. Escape From L.A. lacks tension - it lifts Snake to the level of superhero so we know he'll never get hurt, and the fear of moralistic non-smokers can never, ever equal the shared societal dread of the Cold War era. Carpenter's true talent is his ability to frighten, and he abandons it in Escape From L.A. in favor of shlocky style and humor.

But it almost doesn't matter. Escape From L.A. is so energetic and goofy that only the most die-hard fan of the eighties post-apocalyptic genre is going to get nostalgic for Carpenter's sinister side. All the rest of us have to do is work on enjoying the gratuitous leather bikinis, exploding cars and fountains of fake blood.

Weekly Alibi [Aug 21/1996/US] By Devin D. O'Leary

From Evil Dead to Evil Dead II. From El Mariachi to Desperado. Low budget filmmakers seem to possess this burning desire to top themselves. Now it's John Carpenter's turn to transform his 1981 cult hit Escape From New York into a big budget, big studio romp. The result is a kinetic, star-packed cinematic smorgasbord serving up equal measures of action and amusement.

It's been 16 years since Snake Plissken [Kurt Russell] rescued the American President from the island prison of New York City. Things have not gone well in the interim. Seems "The Big One" finally arrived and transformed Los Angeles into a crumbling aftershock-ridden island. As coincidence would have it, the massive earthquake that shook down L.A. was predicted by a Bible-thumping presidential candidate [Cliff Robertson]. Needless to say, the candidate won by a landslide, and America has been converted into a nightmare of fundamentalism and repression. The Island of Los Angeles now serves as the world's largest prison camp, housing thousands of criminals, dissidents and illegal immigrants.

As our story begins, poor Snake Plissken has been arrested again and is sent to prison - with one caveat. If Snake can locate the President's rebellious daughter and recover a mysterious military device she has stolen, he'll receive a full pardon. As an extra incentive, Snake is injected with a designer virus that will kill him in 24 hours unless he completes his mission. Nothing like a little race against the clock to up the ante. So off to the island of L.A. goes Snake for your basic [anti-]hero's journey.

Yes, the story is essentially a revamp of the original, but don't think you'll be seeing some warmed-over clone of Escape From New York. Director/co-writer Carpenter completely unleashes his imagination with this one and lets it run around like a hyperactive 10-year-old. We're treated to such over-the-top action as Kurt Russell surfing a tsunami down Wilshire Boulevard and such gonzo sights as a climactic hang glider and machine gun fight in a Disneyland-type amusement park.

The satire runs heavy in this one, folks. Whereas 15 years ago, New York City served as the perfect template for our vision of a dystopian future, Los Angeles has now supplanted it as our idea of the Sodom and Gomorrah of tomorrow. Carpenter and company manage to poke fun at gangs, fundamentalism, plastic surgery, organized sports, theme parks and most of all, themselves. When Snake Plissken arrives in prison wearing the exact same urban camouflage and brown bomber jacket we saw him sport back in 1981, one prison official remarks that he "looks so retro."

Mix Carpenter's energetic direction and witty script, Kurt Russell's winking self-parody and a star-stuffed cameo cast [Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Peter Fonda, Bruce Campbell, Pam Grier] and you've got a sure-fire hit. From Halloween to The Thing to Starman, John Carpenter has always been one of Hollywood's most consistent genre directors; it's about time he got back on the box office bandwagon. If only the summer's other action hits had half of this film's charm. It's the perfect summer "Escape."

Entertainment Weekly [Aug 23/1996/US] By Owen Gleiberman

Mad Max and the Planet of the Apes sequels may have paved the way for it, but John Carpenter's Escape From New York [1981] was the first movie to look at the not-too-distant future of American life and see a junk pile, an urban dream falling apart. Even the hero was falling apart: Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken wore an eye patch and a burnout scowl. The film was too crudely made to qualify as a "vision" [that would come later, with Blade Runner and RoboCop], but what kept you watching was the novelty of the premise - Manhattan as an entropic sci-fi comic-book hell.

By now, that decaying-future image pops up once a month or so [most recent version: Barb Wire]. Carpenter, though, hasn't lost his sense of timing. John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. comes along at the perfect moment to honor the passing of the torch from New York to Los Angeles as America’s official Capital of the Apocalypse.

Once again, Snake has to enter a sprawling urban prison zone and, with a deadly virus implanted in his blood, carry out a suicide mission. I have no idea why Russell is doing a brazen Clint Eastwood impersonation, but I do know that no one who looks this good need croak out his lines in this steely a whisper. Carpenter's L.A. suggests a Bosnian refugee camp outfitted by Frederick's of Hollywood. Every so often, we get to feast our eyes upon a trashed landmark - cheesy B-movie mock-ups of the Capitol Records tower and the Beverly Hills Hotel lying in ruins. Carpenter never was the filmmaker his cult claimed him to be, but in Escape From L.A., he at least has the instinct to keep his hero moving, like some leather-biker Candide. Among Snake's more amusing pit stops: a gladiatorial basketball game in the L.A. Coliseum and a cosmetics emporium run by the "Surgeon General of Beverly Hills." C+

Sci-Fi Universe [Vol 3/Issue 1/Sep/1996/US] By Robert Meyer Burnett

At the conclusion of 1981's beloved Escape From New York, Kurt Russell's battered Snake Plissken walks over to Donald Pleasence's recently liberated President of the United States and asks. "We did get you out. A lot of people died in the process. l just wanted to know how you felt about it?" After listening disappointedly to the President's obviously canned response, Snake realizes his own cynicism is well-founded and he opts to destroy a tape containing a weapons formula that's hoped will bring an end to global conflict. But Snake did offer the President a choice before delivering his coup de grace, establishing himself as an honorable man, despite his scrappy, survive-at-all-costs persona. This moment displayed characterization and maturity seldom seen in a low-budget action film, which is why Escape From New York and the character of Snake Plissken remain high points in both director John Carpenter's career and modern genre cinema history.

As an unabashed Carpenter afficionado, believing him to be one of the great genre directors of all time. I desperately hoped the much-anticipated [for sixteen years!] sequel to Escape would not only prove a worthy successor to the original film, but also bring John Carpenter long-overdue respect from critical, box-office and popular quarters, forever eliminating his "cult" director status. So, full of perhaps too much expectation, l snuck in to an advance screening of Escape From L.A. on the Paramount lot, where, with a house packed with obvious industry types, I witnessed an admittedly unfinished work print of the film.

As I awaited the film's unspooling, it quickly became apparent to me that everyone in the theatre [even the jaded professionals] was pulling for the film's success. Everyone in attendance wanted it to be great; no one more so then myself. Unfortunately, and with a sadness usually reserved for the passing of a loved one, I must report that Escape From L.A. proved not just another crushing summer disappointment, but perhaps the most unsatisfying film of Carpenter's two-decade-plus oeuvre

After a humorous and effective opening sequence detailing the destruction of Los Angeles in the "big one," the rise to power of a fanatically right-wing President and America's transformation into a puritan nation, the film quickly develops its greatest flaw: its utter failure to credible establish very universe in which it takes place. Unlike the first film's wonderfully realized New York milieu, which utilized a combination of actual locations [mostly St. Louis and Los Angeles] and a carefully chosen combination of matte and miniature work [under the supervision of James Cameron, no less]. Escape From L.A.'s complete over-reliance on cheesy computer generated effect5 and unconvincing composite work constantly draw attention to themselves, detracting from the audience's ability to accept the film's premise.

Additionally, while the story itself is almost identical to the original film's plot, it makes little sense, barely hanging together at all. As Snake's life-clock ticks down 10 his own personal annihilation, the denizens of Los Angeles are supposedly preparing to participate in a coordinated Third World invasion of the United States. How they plan to accomplish this feat is never explained. Meanwhile, the world of Los Angeles and the relationships of the characters residing in it simply aren't clear. Who are these people, and how is power inside of Los Angeles distributed [Why do people live in such fear of the Duke of LA., Cuervo Jones?] Snake's initial foray into Los Angeles, after surviving a mildly interesting submarine ride through the ruins of the San Fernando Valley and a mud slide about as scary as Splash Mountain, becomes rather promising as he walks amidst the grungy extras choking Hollywood Boulevard in a colorful, hellish splash of society run amok. Then, however, it seems as if the production suddenly ran out of money, as the flow of extras dries up when Snake reaches Sunset Blvd for a rather unsatisfying cycle chase.

The film does have its moments. Bruce Campbell, almost unrecognizable as the Plastic Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, has a great time with his role. Unfortunately, just when he begins to get scary, his character quickly drops out of sight, never to be heard from again. Another effective moment, evocative of Carpenter's second feature Assault on Precinct 13 [which, rather then EFNY, should have served as EFLA's inspiration], comes as Snake runs afoul of the Korean Dragons while trying to navigate down a choked Interstate 5.

Like Escape From L.A.'s beat-for-beat rehash of the first film's plotline, Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken walks, talks and even looks exactly like he did sixteen years ago. Some kind of character development desperately is needed here. What's happened to him in the intervening years? No one, not even Snake Plissken, can't have at least some of time's relentless passage.

The original film's larger-than-life secondary characters are also sorely missed. With the exception of Pam Grier in the Harry Dean Stanton role as Carjack Mallone, a former buddy of Snake's before he sold him out and had a sex change, and the wonderful Valerie Golino as a babe caught after dark in the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time [in the only sequence that taps into the hellishness of life today in the City of Angels], Escape From L.A.'s cast of lowlifes and misfits never comes to life. Stacey Keach, playing Lee Van Cleef's role, never seems to know what to do with himself, projecting none of the menacingly grudging respect Snake Plissken deserves. Michelle Forbes, Star Trek's Ensign Ro, usually a hot spicy salsa number in her own right, seems wooden and one-note. Steve Buscemi as Map to the Stars Eddie, isn't given one funny line. Aside from his initial appearance [humorous only because of the baggage he carries in the pop cultural zeitgeist], Mr. Pink adds surprisingly little to the film. As Cuervo Jones, the film's heavy, George Corraface brings none of the over-the-top histrionics Isaac Hayes so wonderfully brought to his Duke of New York.

The greatest disappointment, however, comes from Peter Fonda's Pipeline, L.A.'s resident sage surfer. Pipeline requires the manic intensity of, say, Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, but Fonda instead sleepwalks his way through the role, barely managing a credible "far out."

The film's climax, a hang glider attack on Cuervo Jones's headquarters in the ruins of the former Happy Kingdom, while an inspired idea, comes off instead as incoherent. Aside from utilizing the gliders to bypass traffic, why are they using them to attack a horde of gun-toting thugs able to pick them off simply by shooting up? How are gliders able to maneuver in an enclosed space? Where does Map to the Stars Eddie disappear to - a ride on the Matterhorn perhaps? Even the editing during this sequence, sluggish through most of the film, makes little sense here. Shots follow shots for no reason, generating absolutely no tension and very little suspense, traits Carpenter usually creates with his eyes closed. And the opportunities for parody inherent in the setting [a thinly veiled Disneyland] are totally squandered, as Carpenter only pays lip service to the film's apparent liberal agenda of examining an America overrun by Ralph Reed wannabes.

As much as it pains me lo admit it - especially after the absolute glee l fell while viewing In the Mouth of Madness - John Carpenter needs to rediscover the innovative passion clearly on display in his earlier works. Simply put, he needs a vacation. But make no mistake, I want him to come back. And while Escape From L.A.'s failure will hardly diminish my love of Escape From New York, I still feel the same sadness at the tremendous unrealized potential I witnessed here that I experienced when viewing Return of the Jedi and Generations for the first time, films which, previous to Escape From L.A., were the greatest disappointments of my genre cinema-going life.

New Statesman [Sep 20/1996/UK] By Boyd Tonkin

As Independence Day has proved in spades, Americans just love to trash their towns. Ever since the Founding Fathers taught the rebels to worship sturdy farmers with ten acres and a gun, native art has often treated any settlement bigger than a village [or a suburb] as Sodom and Gomorrah incarnate.

John Carpenter - whose fierce and funny genre films have teased the hang-ups of his compatriots for 20 years - first touched on his urban angst with Escape From New York. In 1981 he imagined the Manhattan of 1997 as a barbaric penal colony run by [of all people] soul magnate Isaac Hayes. Well, 1997 is just around the corner. New York boasts a plummeting crime rate, street awash with firm-but-fair beat cops and a Republican mayor who hosts admiring visits from British Labour bigwigs. A Republican mayor? Now we're really talking science fiction.

Carpenter, of course, knows very well that his business involves myth and not prediction. The aliens, demons and urban scum of his reliable stylish films sometimes wobble between sending up all-American paranoia and giving it another whirl. That certainly goes for Escape From L.A., which transplants his 1981 premise to the Pacific coast 2013. It mixes hi-tech Armageddon in the Blade Runner mould, mockery of the pious right and PC left alike, and honest-to-badness action scenes sporting mammoth sidearms and plenty of bangs for your buck. Carpenter aims for spectacle with lemony twist of satire. And few punters will complain by the time that Kurt Russell shuts down the entire planet so he can light a fag at last. Some people [I'm told] will know just how he feels.

As in Escape From New York, Russell plays the villainous hired gun Snake Plissken - a gravel-voiced berserker who makes Arnie look like Aled Jones. After the Big One [in AD 2000, natch], the post-quake city of LA has turned into a lawless island gulag. In its debris live the "moral criminals" expelled from non-smoking, church-going mainland USA. Snake's mission is to rescue the errant daughter of a righteous president - Cliff Robertson as a snarling, hatchet-featured bigot - and so earn the antidote to a fatal designer virus that the Feds have thoughtfully injected into him.

Armed with a Secret Weapon [the same one, oddly, as in Goldeneye], young Utopia - AJ Langer - has holed up on the "island of the damned" with a Latino warlord played by George Corraface as a Che Guevara lookalike. We can tell that Utopia has decided to party with the street people because she forsakes her prissy pink suits for leather hot pants. In fact, LA's reversion to the Dark Ages has [as in Blade Runner] meant a sales boom for the Leather Manufacturers of America. The two films share a designer, Lawrence Paull, who strews the nocturnal sets with his trademark roadside braziers, punkish wreckage and a general air of grungy bazaar. Dystopia, did someone say? I've seen worse at London's Camden Lock on Sunday afternoon.

Amid these flame-lit ruins Snake meets a menagerie of exotic local fauna. There's Steve Buscemi as the pallid tout with a Hollywood hustler's line in patter; Pam Grier as a sassy transvestite mobster - half Tina Turner, half Ice T - and Bruce Campbell, a demented cosmetic surgeon who runs his body-parts workshop on KwikFit principles. Oh, and Peter Fonda does a little night-time surfing whenever a tsunami rips down Wilshire Boulevard.

Carpenter crafts all of them as sulphurous cartoons of LA types today, not in 2013. But then he has to hurry, Russell into the next heavy-metal showdown. So the mischief and the mayhem seldom coincide - except in one glorious shot through the "Hollywood" sign, looking down on the vast bonfires below. "Why, this is hell, nor are we out of it," as Mephistopheles [that well-known casting agent] once remarked.

We never quite grasp how the mainland has fallen prey to such a toxic blend of Pat Buchanan and Jane Fonda. With Snake spitting dialogue along the lines of "Don't piss me off or I'll pull the plug." neither will anyone care. [They do. He does.] Carpenter gives a fine lurid spin to the puritan fantasy of a shattered metropolis, complete with blasted freeways and toppled tower-blocks skulking on the ocean floor like images from JG Ballard. "Devine retribution," snaps the Pres. At least "a girl can still wear a fur coat if she wants to," says one of Russell's short-lived sidekicks.

The satire never really moves beyond animal hides and nicotine jokes. Stuck at that level, this spirited hybrid of Judge Dredd and The Handmaid's Tale can't deliver the Big One for John Carpenter. All the same, it should set some teacups rattling in the smug, smoke-free conventicles that stretch from sea to shining sea.

New Musical Express [Sep 28/1996/UK] By Andrew Sumner

OH DEAR, What must have seemed like a good idea at the time - rejuvenating Carpenter's rotting career by press-ganging his currently-hot mate Russell into a return bout as anti-hero Snake Plissken - has metamorphosed into a heavily-hyped embarrassment for all concerned. Despite being loaded with apocalyptic riffs on Carpenter's familiar pop-culture themes, Escape From L.A. just doesn't rock like the director's best work.

In this barefaced beat-for-beat remake of Snake's fondly remembered first outing, Escape From New York, Los Angeles has been destroyed by an earthquake and transformed into an island where a dictatorial President [Cliff Robertson] deposits the US's unwanted scumbags. Sounds familiar? After the Presiden't daughter Utopia falls hostage to LA's revolutionary leader Cuervo Jones [Corraface], Snake is once again blackmailed into penetrating LA, tracking down Utopia and retrieving the key she holds for the President's doomsday waepon.

Apart from the ever-watchable Steve Buscemi [Reservoir Dogs' Mr. Pink] playing another weasely scumbag, co-producer Russell is the only key player to emerge from this fiasco with his reputation relatively intact. Plissken is a brilliantly high-camp creation and Russell retains his demented Clint Eastwood whisper while trading in the first film's dirtied-down combat outfit for a fetching leather catsuit/overcoat combo, showing off his miraculously unchanged physique to fetishistic effect. Sadly, most of Snake's patented sneers and one-eyed stares are wasted on a studio-funded big-money production which transforms the once-irredeemable anti-hero into the kind of soft-hearted tough guy found in most Hollywood shoot-em-ups.

After defining contemporary action cinema with his much-copied '70s classic Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter appears to have forgotten how to direct screen mayhem. Escape From L.A. duplicates all of the weaknesses of the original, with almost none of its strengths. Gone is the downbeat brutality, low-budget claustrophobia and unremittingly nihilistic vibe which made Escape From New York an enduring cult item, leaving a lazy, coincidence-driven plot, wholesale lousy acting, laughably stylized sub-Howard Hawks dialogue and Carpenter's self-penned, soggy techno-wallpaper musical score. Plan your escape now - from the cinema.

Sunday Telegraph [Sep 28/1996/UK] By Chris Peachment

It has been 16 years since John Carpenter's Escape From New York, which has become a late-night video favourite for impressionable girls, but hardly anything has changed for his belated sequel, Escape From LA [15]. Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken certainly hasn't changed his clothes since then. The designer stubble is still intact, and the voice still sounds like a rusty band-saw. Curiously his eye-patch does seem to have shifted from the right to the left eye, but the old line in insolent banter and the serious problem with authority are still the same.

The plot is a shameless re-tread too. This time it is Los Angeles that has been turned into a prison for all those dissidents who don't like the idea of living in an America which has been declared a no-smoking zone, where red meat and sex outside marriage have been banned, and the President [Cliff Robertson] is a crazed fundamentalist. Into this hellish region Snake must venture in order to rescue the President's daughter, who has done a Patty Hearst and decamped with a doomsday machine into the arms of the chief criminal. And, as in all the best thrillers, time is running out. Snake has been injected with a deadly virus, just to ensure his return for the antidote.

There are plenty of nice touches in the film. Sunset Boulevard is a wrecked car dump, the LA Coliseum has become an execution ground, and Snake even gets to surf a huge wave down the length of Wilshire Boulevard accompanied by old hippy Peter Fonda. In the original film, Snake was always greeted with, "I thought you were dead." This time around it is, "I thought you'd be taller." But that is all the film really amounts to - a series of good moments strung together without much sense of purpose. The action film has come a long way in 10 years, and we now expect aliens blowing up Washington in full close-up. Had this film come out 14 years ago, it would probably still be a late-night video treat, rather than looking a mite tired.

Dreamwatch [Issue 26/Oct/1996/UK] By Dennis Toth

There are two major warning signs of a director in steep decline. The first is when they remake their own movies. The second is when they remake them badly. John Carpenter's Escape From LA is vivid proof of both points. The fact that Carpenter stuck his name into the title even incokes the third warning sign. No wonder this movie has become the current favourite target for the critical equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

Unfortunately, the bad press is amply earned. In its efforts to redo and surpass the original, Escape From LA merely succeeds in making Escape From New York look like a masterpiece. Despite the critical beating that it received upon its release in 1981, Escape From New York has managed to achieve a well deserved cult reputation. But the lean and mean B-movie attitude that made the original so exciting has given way in its sequel to a pricy sense of flabbiness. In Escape From LA, everything is bigger and flashier than it was before. Everything is also slower and dumber.

Snake Plissken [Kurt Russell] is especially inclined to fits of denseness. Once again, the surly futuristic commando-turned-criminal is snatched by the US Police Force and is about to be deported to the Island of Los Angeles [big quake, you know]. Likewise, the President [Cliff Robertson] is once again in trouble [it's an occupational hazard]. Seems that his bad seed daughter [AJ Langer] has fled to LA to be with her Maoist homeboy lover [George Corraface]. Even worse, she has taken with her a black box containing the satellite command codes to one of Daddy's favourite secret weapons.

As usual, Plissken is indifferent to the national crisis [which in the States should make him a prime presidential candidate]. So the head of the US Police Force [Stacy Keach] injects him with a deadly, time-delayed virus as a personal inducement. You would think that old Snake might groan under the weight of so much déjà vu in one movie.

As was also the case in the original, Plissken has to deal with a treacherous ally [Steve Buscemi], an ex-partner [Pam Grier in an offbeat tribute to The Crying Game], and a helpful fan [Peter Fonda in a rôle that should have gone to Dennis Hopper]. Completely wasted in minor parts are both Michelle Forbes and Bruce Campbell, though Campbell's freaky turn as the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills provokes a few chilly laughs.

But embasrassed giggles will be the audience's main response to Escape From LA. In between bouts of surprisingly mediocre special effects and lacklustre stunt scenes, the movie limps from one dull gag to another. Post-apocalyptic Los Angeles festers with heavy armed gang members and fast talking con artists, which means that La-LaLand is still the same despite the geological shift. But the movie never goes than the obvious and result plays like a boorishly pushy afternoon in Burbank.

Equally uninspired is the political focus in the film, and Escape From LA is intended by Carpenter to be his political statement piece. The President is a right-wing religious zealot who lucked into office when he prophesied the coming of the great quake. His daughter has mistaken puppy love for a liberal cause. In turn, her boyfriend is a Shining Path guerilla leader planning a Third World invasion against the United States. Plissken is a gun-toting civil liberarian who wants his red meat and cigarette right now, no matter what anybody else thinks.

Maybe this could have been good satire [as was the case in Carpenter's under appreciated production of They Live]. But Carpenter would have needed a good screenwriter to pull it off. Since the script to Escape From LA was co-authored by the director, the producer, and the star, it's a safe bet that the story was hastily concocted during a power brunch with assorted agents.

Which also means that everybody was too busy making deals instead of a movie. Escape From LA appears to have been a quick afterthought jotted down on a few cocktail napkins during a heated discussion about percentage points.

Empire [Issue 88/Oct/1996/UK] By Kim Newman

In 1981, John Carpenter, then a hot director whose track record included Dark Star, Assault On Precinct 13 and Halloween, made Escape From New York, a futuristic action movie starring Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, an eyepatch-sporting, dirtbag hero. Now a decade and a half later, Carpenter has slipped to DTV disappointments such as Village Of The Damned while Russell has never quite graduated from star to superstar.

Along with producer Debra Hill, the pair have got back together to knock together a screenplay for a sequel. And in so doing, they have come up with lots of neat ideas and characters, but still fall back on the same old, far from original plot.

An earthquake has turned Los Angeles into an island where President Cliff Robertson dumps the nation's undesirables. However, LA's Che Guevara wannabe supremo, Cuervo Jones [Corraface] has got hold of a remote control unit that can shut off all the machines in the world.

The fascist Christian regime again calls on the still shaggy, still unshaven Russell to retrieve the macguffin. Given that a fair budget has been allowed, it's a shame that the whole thing seems such a scrappy dull-witted spectacle, with extras standing around in the dark as Snake breezes past on mini-sub, bike, helicopter or surfboard.

The stupidity of the plot can be gauged from the sequence in which the one-eyes Plissken saves his life by demonstrating his basketball skills [close one eye and try to shoot some hoops for further elucidation]. There are promising characters played by decent actors - Stacy Keach as head cop, Peter Fonda as a surfer dude, Bruce Campbell as a plastic surgeon, Buscemi as a triple-crosser, Pam Grier as a transvestite - but no one has anything to do except trade insults with Snake and get left behind by the film's race to go nowhere fast. In 1981, Escape From New York seemed like Carpenter's least interesting film; now, Escape From L.A. makes it seem a masterpiece.

Film Review [Issue 550/Oct/1996/UK] By James Cameron-Wilson

Snake is back.

Fifteen years ago, Kurt Russell and John Carpenter teamed up to make Escape From New York, which, for various reasons, became something of a cult. Kurt played an exceedingly gruff anti-hero called Snake "Call me Snake" Plissken, who is forced to extradite the US president from within the prison walls of the Big Apple.

Russell, who makes a habit of working with Carpenter, wanted to do a sequel as far back as 1985. When the Northridge earthquake struck in early 1994, he hit on an idea for a follow-up, which he has now collaborated on as co-scripter and co-producer.

This time it is the City of Angels which is the prison, an island cut off from the mainland following a devastating quake ["The Big One"]. Set in the year 2013, America has become a politically orthodox nightmare, where smoking, read meat and unapproved marriages are outlawed. Transgressors are promptly shut off to LA island which now harbours the detritus of society psychopaths, prostitutes and those who wear real fur.

Injected with a time-coded virus, Snake is given eight hours to gatecrash LA, retrieve a stolen doomsday gizmo and get back to terra firma.

As to be expected from a budget of $50 million, the special effects are brilliant [particularly the initial quake], the sets are awesome and the humour suitably tongue-in-cheek. Russell still looks great at 45 and never betrays his material, although the gaps in the logic frequently do. However, there's enough good material here to auger another sequel, just so long as Russell can keep to his work-out regimen.

Focus [Oct/1996/UK] By Sean Blair

So Los Angeles is a den of violence, decadence, anarchy, debauchery and obsessive plastic surgery - what else is new? However, this is the future - 2015, to be precise - and the City of Angels has paid for its sins with a devastating earthquake that leaves it a ruined, isolated island. An ultra right-wing President takes advantage of this by deporting to LA all undesirables - atheists, meat-eaters, smokers and those having sex outside marriage.

But when the President's daughter revolts and steals away a secret doomsday weapon to the prison-city, there's only one man tough enough to find her and get the weapon back. Step forward Snake Plissken.

Yes, 15 years after the classic Escape From New York, star Kurt Russell and director John Carpenter have re-teamed for a sequel. Russell's career has taken a dramatic up-swing of late [Tombstone, Stargate, Executive Decision], but Carpenter's has stalled sufficiently for a sure-fire hit to be an attractive proposition. And that, in a sense, is where the problem lies.

Escape From L.A. is really more remake than sequel. Once again, Snake's number is up if he fails to deliver - this time courtesy of a deadly virus - and once again, with the odds stacked heavily against him, he's forced to team up with the assorted freaks and scumbags who inhabit the shattered city.

Besides being formulaic, the script also writes cheques that the special effects cannot cash. Obvious computer-generated imagery renders set-pieces like the initial earthquake, Snake's submarine ride into LA and the city's devastated boulevards very unimpressive indeed.

What saves the movie is its bizarre guest stars: Peter Fonda as one of the last surfers in LA, 70s Blaxploitation queen Pam Grier as transsexual crime boss Hershe, Steve Buscemi as double-dealing Eddie, and the show-stopper-Bruce "Evil Dead" Campbell as Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, leading a troupe of hideous cosmetic surgery mutants on the hunt for fresh transplant donors.

Select [Oct/1996/UK] By Clark Collis

John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is really for Those People Who Loved Escape From New York More Than Life Itself And Want To See It Re-Made With A Much Bigger Budget. Of course, the irony here is that (a) virtually no one went to see the first one and (b) despite being handed $40m, Carpenter has made a movie that actually looks far cheaper than the first one. Apart from that it's business as usual. Kurt Russell is sent off to a post-apocalyptic wasteland and gets into scrapes while looking rather surly. Carpenterheads should be more than satisfied, although everyone else will think that they've bought themselves a day pass to hell. The worrying thing, though, is that, should be some miracle Escape From L.A. become a massive success, then it will conclusively prove that Hollywood really can flog us any cold rubbish that it fancies.

SFX [Issue 17/Oct/1996/UK] By Anthony Brown

"Sounds familiar," to quote Snake Plissken. The escape pod from a presidential jet has gone down in an American metropolis-turned-penal colony and the future of the entire planet depends on its contents. The only man who can recover them is that notorious hero-turned-outlaw Snake Plissken, who's already facing an artificially-induced personal countdown which ensures he won't live to see Armageddon if he fails...

Once upon a time, before they got respectable[-ish], sequels were often shameless remakes of the original - and Escape From L.A. harks back to such days. The scenario's exactly the same, Snake's allies and enemies in LA are cut from the same stereotypes as those he met in New York, and 16 years on. Plissken's still a celebrity of such stature even Madonna would want his autograph.

But this is no straightforward by-the-numbers remake. The situations may be the same, but the outcomes are frequently different - you can almost see Carpenter raiding his garage for the scenes and drafts he didn't use in 1979. The result is more an alternative version of Escape From New York than a reproduction, and has a knowing wit on occasion. For a start, everyone knows what happened in the previous film, so Michelle Forbes and Stacy Keach's government agents are always one step ahead of Snake as he tries the same old tricks.

The basic scenario has also been tweaked to introduce an up-to-the-minute satirical edge, outlined in a sardonically amusing "history lesson" which opens the film. In the year 2000, "The Big One" struck Los Angeles, a few weeks after a right-wing presidential candidate predicted that God would wipe this modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah from the face of the Earth. Not unnaturally, he got elected... and 13 years on the President-for-life has made Los Angeles island a penal colony for those convicted of "moral crimes" against his religious republic. Unfortunately, his teenage daughter Utopia's going through a bit of a rebellious phase and has stolen the trigger for a network of orbiting EM pulse generators which could put an end to technology worldwide. If the trigger should happen to fall into the hands of her guru, Peruvian guerilla Cuervo Jones, it's goodbye America... And some would say good riddance.

There's certainly a good ironic edge to Escape, with some neat throwaway lines, including a casual reference to a certain major movie company being bankrupted by a disastrous theme park outside Paris... More serious is the claim that the chaos of LA represents, "the last place where the American dream survives, free from the regulations of a dictorial government." Apparently enough, the character who says this is soon afterwards gunned down by a burst of deregulated street gunfire...

Sadly, this aspect of the film is rather half-heartedly explored. The inmates of LA are supposedly prostitutes, atheists, meat-eaters, smokers, etc... but they're more your standard issue street scum than the mix of liberals, eccentrics and down-and-outs you'd expect to fall foul of a fundamentalist president, and the obvious irony of, "Well, look how politically correct they are now..." is conspicuous by its absence.

Escape From L.A. also loses a few grades for being such a blatant repeat of the original, particularly on the occasions when doing so makes nonsense of the plot. Cuervo Jones is supposedly the ruler of a hefty chunk of the Third World and about to launch a full-scale invasion of the United States, so why's he wasting time lording it over LA? Does he make a habit of hanging around just in case President's daughter drops in with the key to a doomsday weapon?

Also disappointingly are the off-embarrassing CGI effects and a number of awkward plot holes. Why do the helicopter pilots leave the safety of the bullet-proof machine, for instance? Could it possibly be that the vehicle wasn't bullet-proof until it needed to be a few minutes later?

However, as more of the same, Escape From L.A. is enjoyable, and boosted by a wise reinterpretation of the original's memorable score. Plus, the ending ensures the inevitable third installment will have to thread a distinctly different path to its predecessors. Mad Max meets Survivors in Escape From the Earth, anyone?

Sight & Sound [Oct/1996/UK] By Philip Strick

2013 A.D. Los Angeles has become an island, abandoned to its own lawlessness by the rest of the US which is ruled by a fundamentalist President. Controlled by ruthless South American revolutionary Cuervo Jones, the LA penal colony is joined by the President's runaway daughter, Utopia, who brings with her the controlling device for a satellite weapon that could shut down the entire planet. Assigned to recover the device and eliminate Utopia is the infamous outlaw Snake Plissken, whose reward will be a full pardon and the antidote to a fatal virus with which he has been secretly infected.

Plissken reaches the island and makes his way down Sunset Boulevard. When Jones drives by, Plissken commandeers a bike to follow him but gets delayed by four of Jones' men. He refuses guidance to Jones' headquarters offered by 'Map to the Stars' Eddie. When Snake pauses to rescue a girl, Taslima, from mysterious cowled figures, they capture him as well. They are taken to the laboratory of the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, who wants their body parts, but Plissken breaks free and escapes with Taslima. She is later killed by a stray bullet.

Jones threatens to activate the satellite system unless he is provided with a helicopter. Meanwhile, Plissken falls into Jones' hands and is forced to play a basketball game at the LA Coliseum in order to stay alive. An earthquake hits and Plissken escapes, closely followed by Utopia with the satellite controls. Eddie shoots Plissken in the leg and makes off with the device, but with the help of a surfing fanatic, Pipeline, Plissken rides a tsunami wave down Wilshire Boulevard and catches up with him.

Plissken Finds a former associate, Carjack, now called Hershe and persuades her to help him capture the helicopter being sent to collect Jones. As it lands there is a monumental battle in which Jones and Eddie destroy each other but Plissken manages to airlift Utopia to the mainland. Awaiting them, Malloy reveals that the "fatal virus" was actually harmless, while the President straps Utopia to an electric chair and gets ready to unleash satellite firepower at all the US's enemies. Plissken, however, has retained the genuine control tape and shuts down the planet's power sources, saving Utopia from electrocution.

"Sounds familiar," murmurs the one-eyed Snake in his habitual Eastwood monotone, and much of the point of Escape From L.A. is that it shamelessly copies the Plissken predicament of 15 years ago in Escape From New York. Not much has changed: the president is still an arrogant coward, the country's city-sized primary prison still has all the supplies it needs to maintain a state of enthusiastic anarchy, and there is still one inmate so untamable that he has to be kept in a different prison, making him conveniently available for special projects. When a piece of equipment falls into the wrong hands, there is still no specially-trained undercover unit available to get it back. There is only one grimy, growling, grumpy old Snake, eye-patch and stubble miraculously unimpaired by the passing years, willing to infiltrate enemy lines because the latest designer drug will otherwise shut him down in the next few hours.

Although claimed by Kurt Russell as his favourite role, Snake makes poor company. While his contempt for the New Moral America, with its ranting evangelistic leader and black-armoured police troops, appears not unreasonable, the exact nature of a career so monstrous that the entire underworld is in awe of him is left disturbingly unspecified. Serial killer? Great train robber? Chain smoker [cigarettes are now banned]? How would he actually spend his freedom if he had any? Belying his name, he has no time to waste on charm, although he automatically comes to the rescue of women in distress only to walk away when they're out of danger. Snake's main purpose seems solely to survive in situations where survival is unlikely, an often remarkable achievement which serves only to deepen his perpetual scowl.

Substituting Stacey Keach for Lee Van Cleef, the ubiquitous Steve Buscemi for Ernest Borgnine, and Che Guevara lookalike George Corraface for Isaac Hayes, Escape From L.A. is the weaker for having found no clear equivalent to the Harry Dean Stanton/Adrienne Barbeau partnership in the earlier film. Clumsily handled as that was, it conveyed a pathos, even an illusion of purpose, that the new audience throws aside except, perhaps, in the case of the wistful surfer [a wholly self-absorbed Peter Fonda] briefly riding his dreams on the edge of the action. Intended, of course, as nothing more significant than a subversive romp for Plissken admirers, the film is welter of in-jokes, out-jokes, allusions and references, sprinkled lightly with great special effects. At this level, exercising indulgent goodwill, we may cheer the glimpse of Paul Bartel, the running gag "I though you'd be taller" [last time it was "I though you were dead"], the glee with which Carpenter has reduced identifiable bits of Los Angeles to ruins, and the happy invention of the Surgeon General, cosmetic specialist of Beverly Hills, with his desperate band of clients whose face lifts are coming apart at the seams.

Indicative of what it might have been, the earthquake opening - while inevitably in the shadows of Independence Day as all disasters must now be - is appealingly cataclysmic, and there is a glimpse of the submersible gliding among drowned buildings that suggest a much classier mood and pace. What the films lacks is certainly not the sparkle of unusual images but any sense of confidence about what to do with them. Even the wonderfully ridiculous spectacle of a tidal wave pursuing a car down Wilshire Boulevard fails to dissipate the film's drudging quality. As happens disappointingly often in John Carpenter's later work, an increasing tedium suggests that while variations on themes of siege and evasion are no end of fun for him to think up, the business of filming them is something of a chore.

Starburst [218/Vol 19/Issue 2/Oct/1996/UK] By Alan Jones

They say a picture paints a thousand words. But Escape From L.A. is CRAP. And as for the description 'sequel', what a nerve! I feel a new dictionary definition is in order to describe this manufactured mess of meaningless machismo. A shambolic big budget [complete with egos] remake of the far superior Escape From New York, this actionless, humourless, tedious, paceless, empty vessel of worn-out ideas is the worst John Carpenter movie since - well, the last John Carpenter movie.

Escape From L.A. is far too late, much too predictable and, I fear the final nail in John Carpenter's creative coffin. Beginning like Earthquake [showing the cheesy devastation making L.A. a future island] and ending up as Flash Gordon [with the goodies hang-gliding into the baddies' den], this is one Hollywood tour not worth taking. It's an endless parade of of uninspired a unimaginative set-pieces played out amongst the ruins of Beverly Hills and Mulholland Drive, charting Snake Plissken [Kurt Russell's] search for a doomsday device stolen by the American President's daughter and given to the Castro-like revolutionary head [George Corraface] of the tarnished City of Angels.

Snake has been injected with a slow-acting deadly virus to blackmail him into cruising the streets of fire where he meets surfer dude [Peter Fonda, still mining his Easy Rider persona], 'Map to the Stars' Eddie [Steve Buscemi, in fine weaselly form], the flesh merchant Surgeon General [Bruce Campbell] and former comrade sex-change Hershe [a dubbed Pam Grier]. None of the formless episodes under-employing this gallery of gritty grotesques adds up to much, and the tidal wave surf down Wilshire Boulevard - and the gladiatorial basketball match to the death plumb - new depths of brainless stupidity.

With Russell's styrofoam Schwarzenegger - complete with Clint Eastwood rasp, grating as never before - Carpenter's charmless monstrosity takes itself far too seriously for its own good. The lack of humour, black or otherwise - aside from the witty face-lift zombie section - is only one of the misguided creative choices Carpenter [together with his co-writer/co-producer team of Russell and Debra Hill] has seen fit to derail this potentially fun franchise. But then the special effects work begs many awkward questions too. How did those awful matte paintings got past the planning stages? Who's responsible for those terrible CGIs, like the mini-sub and helicopter blades? Why are all the explosions so boring? In fact, what was everyone thinking when they shot this 'microwaved Mad Max'?'

Inept and unexciting to a quite shocking degree, Escape From L.A. is routine even by Carpenter's low standards of late. It hardly cuts together as a cohesive whole - just watch the Yawnville rope-around-the-helicopter sequence for how not to edit action - and... Oh, why bother going on? You get the picture. It's just just a shame Carpenter did.

Q [Issue 122/Nov/1996/UK] By Adam Smith

Back in the olden days, before John Carpenter "went shit" [a date pinned down by film historians to 1986 and Big Trouble in Little China], he used to turn out quietly effective low budget pieces along the lines of Halloween and the truly excellent Dark Star. In Escape From L.A. - not so much a sequel as a redundant remake - he demonstrates that any remaining vestiges of that talent have been utterly lost.

The year is 2013 and post-apocalyptic earthquake has been transformed into an island deportation point for the "immoral" ex-citizens of the newly puritanical USA. President's daughter Utopia [A.J. Langer] has lifted a superweapon, in a typically teenage fit of social conscience, and wound up on the island. Snake Pliskin [Russell] is dosed with a deadly virus, Plutoxin 7, told he's got eight hours to live, and sent in to retrieve the goods.

After that it's third-rate action all the way, with Russell attempting a monosyllabic "man-with-no-name" act, Steve Buscemi in his first real stinker, and bargain basement digital FX all set to a Carpenter-penned score which, at best, can be described as eclectic. Attempts to satirise modern, PC Los Angeles mostly fall flat, and, to cap it all, Stacey Keach is in it.

Cinefantastique [Vol 28/Issue 6/Dec/1996/US] By Dennis Fischer

A follow-up to the entertaining Escape From New York sounded like a great idea, a chance to do a fanciful action picture with a few satirical jibes along the way. Los Angeles is full of targets ripe for deflation, but Carpenter and co-writers Hill and Russell take aim only at the most obvious ones [religious leaders, street gangs, plastic surgery]. Unfortunately, they have opted to treat the plot of the original as a magic formula for success, replicating so many elements that the whole endeavor quickly becomes predictable.

The film has a terrific cast and a generous budget, but the special effects spectacle of a post-earthquake L.A. seems as phony as the movie convention of motorcycles that explode whenever they crash and as unconvincing as the concept that the exiled denizens [the "last free zone" in the world] would be supplied with bullets and gas so that a racist cliche of a Shining Path guerrilla could keep his followers in line while remaining a threat to U.S. security.

Good science-fiction has some internal logic operating under even the most outrageous premises, but Escape forgoes such niceties. Even more devastating, it lacks any indication of Carpenter's cinematic mastery - it's soulless enough that it could have been directed by one of his Italian imitators, as if Carpenter committed to make a commercial project which promoted dumb action while sacrificing interesting characterization and thematically rich plot. One hopes he will shake this penchant for crafting unworthy remakes or at least blaze boldly in a new direction as he did with The Thing.