Escape From L.A.
Snake is Back
The man with the patch is back. Call him Snake. Kurt Russell rejoins filmmakers John Carpenter and Debra Hill to do to the Big Orange what they did to the Big Apple in Escape From New York - with even more futuristic thrills and slam-bang action!
Into the 9.6-quaked Los Angeles of 2013 comes Snake Plissken (Russell). His job: wade through L.A.'s ruined landmarks to retrieve a doomsday device. Don't miss the excitement as Snake surfs Wilshire Blvd., shoots hoops at the Coliseum, dive bombs the Happy Kingdom theme park, and mixes it up with a wild assortment of friends, fiends and foes (Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Petter Fonda, George Corraface, Cliff Robertson, Pam Grier and more).
Member Reviews
Misguided and poorly executed sequel - kevo64
John Carpenter is a favorite director of mine, but his best days were in the 70's and 80's. It is like he ran out of ideas around 1989 and just filmed horribly derivative remakes of his best movies after that. This has a great cast, good budget and yet looks terrible and is very poorly acted. It's like he lost all his mojo after Prince of Darkness, an ok movie not even close to his best, and has lost all sense of storytelling and style. Not as bad as Ghosts of Mars, but pretty close. the Blu-Ray transfer is just as poor as the movie, one of the worst I have seen. Stick to the vastly superior Escape From New York or any other Carpenter movie from the 70's or early 80's.Interesting - mxg123
Several years after a major earth quake in Los Angeles, which severed the city from the mainland USA. A major criminal is sent to the condemned severed city to retrieve a black suitcase for the US President, and if he not successful he wound die from an injected virus, which he will be given the antivirus only on completion of the successful mission.Not terrible - Ubik
This is a silly, deliberately over-the-top, mildly enjoyable action/satire. The movie makes fun of silly action movies at the same time that it tries to be one, and if you key in on the satire, you'll enjoy the movie a bit more. In other words, it knows it's silly, it knows it's ridiculous, and it knows it makes no sense. Also, it's never boring, if never completely compelling either. Basically, if you like this sort of thing, you'll probably enjoy this movie. It's really not bad at all.
What makes this so watchable is the acting (on the whole, the acting is better than this movie requires), and especially the production values. It has the look, the sets, the costumes, the money, of a genuine post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. The destruction of L.A. at the beginning is really quite awesome. The city streets and piled up cars and mounds of rubble and ruins of buildings, it's all very thorough and convincing. So, the world the movie creates is a large part of the charm. The only things lacking to make this a real honest-to-god post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie are the ambition, the script, the ideas, the brains...anyway, the movie looks great. And the action scenes are well-filmed. And there are a few real laughs here, too.
So, if you don't mind something with low ambition but sufficient entertainment value, and if you don't expect something as good as Escape from New York, this isn't a bad use of an evening.
Member Reviews
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Misguided and poorly executed sequel - kevo64
John Carpenter is a favorite director of mine, but his best days were in the 70's and 80's. It is like he ran out of ideas around 1989 and just filmed horribly derivative remakes of his best movies after that. This has a great cast, good budget and yet ...Interesting - mxg123
Several years after a major earth quake in Los Angeles, which severed the city from the mainland USA. A major criminal is sent to the condemned severed city to retrieve a black suitcase for the US President, and if he not successful he wound die from an injected ...Not terrible - Ubik
This is a silly, deliberately over-the-top, mildly enjoyable action/satire. The movie makes fun of silly action movies at the same time that it tries to be one, and if you key in on the satire, you'll enjoy the movie a bit more. In other words, it knows it's ...