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Rating:  -
This movie is a complete rehash from start to finish. There isn't one original idea or anything that sets it apart. Story and plot wise from Escape from NY. A pure rehash.
The story is exactly the same. EXCEPT. The prison island LA happens to break off from the US due to an earthquake. There all the outlaws are sent to it to live their lives anyway they feel. Then comes Snake. He's forced to go there and this time retrieve a device. Under the same stipulations as the first.
This movie seriously got on my nerves big time! It followed the exact same formula except it had more action and better special effects. He11 Snake was again wounded in the exact same leg as the first. The ending is the same also.
To be honest you can watch either one of these first and enjoy one and not like the other. If you want lots of action and special effects. Get this one. If you want less action with a bit more steatlh. Watch escape from NY. Me, I'm just going to ditch this one and keep the first. Its also weak on extras too. For those who want to know.
Rating:  -
They sure don't make 'em like this anymore -- that much can be said for this balls-to-the-wall, over-the-top sequel to John Carpenter's classic "Escape From New York." In "Escape From L.A.," the audience is reunited with loveable Snake Plissken, the eye-patch sporting, leather-clad war-hero made famous by Kurt Russell. Russell, together with Carpenter and his long-time collaborater, Debra Hill, wrote the script, so you can bet that not only is it a labor of love for all involved in the making of the movie, but also a fitting companion-piece to the original. If you haven't seen the original, don't fear. Like any good action sequel, this one does it's audience the favor of existing as a stand-alone feature as well.
The year is 2013. The constitution has been rewritten and the president is serving his life-long term. Red meat, along with other simple pleasures such as premarital sex, alcohol and any sort of fun has been outlawed. Those who can't comply or conform with this ultra-conservative new vision of The United States are banished to Los Angeles. Doesn't sound so bad, but unfortunately and conveniently, L.A. has been isolated from the country by a devastating earthquake and transformed into a prison camp, full of the dirtiest and uncivilized criminals and low-lifes. Universal Studios has been banished to the depths of the Pacific Ocean, and you can bet this ain't the happiest place on Earth. After being captured by the government and injected with a deadly virus for motivational purposes, Snake is dispatched to this wasteland to retreive a doomsday device, hijacked by the president's daughter, which has the power to revert Earth back to the dark ages. As our hero wades through the sewers, surfs tsunamis and plays a deadly game of basketball, he encounters some colorful characters along the way, played by the likes of Steve Buscemi, Bruce Campbell, Peter Fonda and Pam Grier. If you think these characters are bold and outlandish, just get a load of the action, which takes many liberties with the human imagination and stands out from much of the disposable fluff of it's time ("Independence Day," for one).
Since this is a John Carpenter film, you know two things: First, the music is going to be good. Composed by Carpenter himself, it's yet another classic score. Second, the movie looks gorgeous. There may be some dodgy special effects here and there, but for 1996, this is a pretty tight looking feature. It's far from a perfect film, but at the very least, it's an example of the best escapism movies have to offer. Kurt Russell is brilliant and doesn't miss a mark as Snake, and Carpenter's vision is that of confidence and bold imagination. Those who appreciate a good action flick that checks your brain at the door will find salvation in "Escape From L.A."
Rating: -
I knew what I was getting into when I rented this film. Although I'm a devoted enthusiast of the likes of Fellini, Tarkovsky and Imamura (among others), when I see John Carpenter's name on the package, I know to turn my brain off and enjoy the fun. Besides, I'd seen this before: as a much younger "Escape From New York" fan eleven years ago, I remember the disappointment that I experienced when viewing this in the theater. But I chose to dust this off and give it another shot - after all, the projector broke down twice in the theater during my viewing, and perhaps I didn't comprehend the camp appeal of this movie in my late teens as well as I might now, right?
EFLA is still a gigantic disappointment - not only because it is certainly not a good film, but because it has so much going for it. There's actually a lot to enjoy here, even though these better elements are all horribly wasted on what amounts to a bloated, mediocre production. I'll examine what works before trudging through what doesn't, if only to cushion the critique.
The film's critical and commercial failure can't be blamed on the performances of its' cast, most of whom are brilliantly deadpan. Everyone here - Russell, Keach, Golino, Buscemi, Grier, Campbell, Corraface - deliver performances as spot-on as all of their respective cult fan followings would expect. Old Kurt is especially fun, reprising the role of the tough-as-nails Plissken, who's no less vicious or nihilistic despite being knee-deep in middle age. Although Snake's killer instinct and closeted decency are still intact, Russell also imbues the character with a certain resigned weariness this time around, though this hint of depth hardly slows him down. The only cast member who doesn't cut it is Henry Fonda, simply because he is here what he's always been: a terrible actor. I could care less if Fonda is iconic in the context of Californian culture. So are a lot of other people. Screen lead is screen lead, and whenever Fonda is onscreen, Russell's enormous presence is almost negated by Fonda's lack thereof.
I can't bring myself to criticize the film's script as fervently (albeit fairly) as many others have, but I must admit that a plot that wasn't just a retread of EFNY's would have been nice. Of course, this is one of many reasons why EFLA falls short of its' potential. The dialogue is mostly clever, but the stupidity of many of the concepts implemented here can't be surmounted by good performances. I did not ever want to see Snake Plissken surf a tsunami wave, fly a hang glider or shoot hoops to save his life, and I'm sorry that I ever did. It's interesting that Russell trained so rigorously between takes in order to execute a full-court shot, but the greatness of Kurt doesn't make a dumb scene any less asinine. If this is the best that Carpenter, Hill and Russell could come up with, maybe they should have just shot another scene wherein Snake fights another beastly convict with a baseball bat and a trash can lid. The film's setting of a fundamentalist Christian American theocracy (which is as emasculating as it is repressive) is cleverly conceived and portrayed, but never in sufficient detail as the concept deserves.
So the performances are almost uniformly great and the script is flawed (albeit passable), but what really brings this project to its' knees is an overblown, incompetent production. Bad choreography and editing are highlighted by painfully flat, lifeless cinematography. Los Angeles looks entirely like a series of rather cheap sets because it is. In EFNY, the slums of St. Louis served as perfectly creepy, dismal backdrops representing the massive ghetto prison that New York had been transformed into. In EFLA, almost everything was very obviously shot on a set. It's not just that the atmosphere that EFNY had in excess is lacking here; it's missing entirely! The terrible, (relatively) early CGI effects don't help matters. Considering the amount of money poured into the production, couldn't more models (especially miniatures) have been used? They surely would have looked more realistic.
To put this into perspective, let me provide some proof to support my theory that John Carpenter hasn't made a good film in almost twenty years because he doesn't know how to work with a huge budget. The production costs of "Escape From New York" amounted to approximately $7 million (Carpenter estimated it at $5.5 million) and it went on to gross $50 million internationally, making it one of the most successful B-movies in film history. By contrast, the budget for "Escape From L.A." was $50 million and the film raked in $30 million worldwide.
So was the tedium of my first viewing experience over a decade ago really to be blamed on a faulty projector or my own lack of wit? Unfortunately, no: the blame is to be placed on the man who took what might have been a classic sequel and made it into a rather tiresome schlockfest: John Carpenter.
Rating:  -
"The United States is a no-smoking nation," announces Stacy Keach in John Carpenter's Escape From L.A., revealing what it will be like to live in right-wing America, circa 2013: "No smoking, no drinking, no drugs, no guns, no foul language, no red meat." And, on the basis of what we see here, no decent movies. In the crowded field of "Who Asked For This Anyway?" sequels, those so-awful-they're-funny follow-ups to hit flicks, like Texasville, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, King Kong Lives and The Evening Star, Escape From L.A. stands tall as a shining beacon of Bad Moviedom. Time has not been kind to Snake, Kurt Russell's ultramanly Escape From New York antihero, conceived over 15 years ago in tribute to Clint Eastwood's sandpapery spaghetti Western loner. Today, decked out in long hair and an all-black skintight wardrobe with matching eye patch, mondo-butch Russell conjures up not Eastwood but his own Captain Ron--after one too many drinks at a West Hollywood leather bar.
Ordered by president Cliff Robertson onto the maximum-security prison island of Los Angeles to retrieve a doomsday machine in less than 10 hours or die, Russell sneers, "You'd better hope I don't make it back" (which is exactly what we were thinking on the way out of Escape From New York). He then sets off to track down evil terrorist George Corraface in the post-apocalyptic ruins of L.A. Captured briefly by baddies inside the Beverly Hills Hotel, now a plastic surgery house of horrors full of "surgical failures" whose implants and face-lifts have all "turned to Jell-O," Russell realizes that L.A. has become an island of the damned. But Valerie Golino, the tough cookie he has teamed up with, sees it differently: for her, L.A. is "the only free zone left, where a girl can still wear a fur coat if she wants to." It's an idea she's promptly shot dead for by a sniper--presumably a 21st century PETA activist.
You know you're watching a cheeseball classic when Russell glances down at his Special Countdown Watch to see that he has only seven more hours left to complete his mission and then, several minutes later, Stacy Keach informs Russell by walkie-talkie that he has only seven and a half hours left.
Things go seriously awry for Russell when he hitches a ride with Steve Buscemi, overacting as usual, this time as a Pee-wee Hermanesque slimeball who does dirty work for the highest bidder. Buscemi hits Russell with a poisonous dart gun and what happens next is so shocking that out-of-shape couch potatoes should stop reading right this second because it's their worst nightmare: Russell wakes up to find he's been shackled to a treadmill and is being aerobicized to death. When he mysteriously survives that ordeal, the villainous Corraface has him taken to a coliseum where he's forced to play a solo game of basketball in which he must score consecutive baskets or be machine-gunned down (an idea we think the NBA should take a look at). As luck would have it, Russell (who cowrote the script, mind you) plays basketball like no white guy you've ever seen.
Russell escapes his theoretically deadly workouts only to be shot in the leg by Buscemi. Just then, a tidal wave happens by and friendly stoner Peter Fonda teaches the bleeding Russell how to surf a tsunami. As Fonda puts it, "Bitchin'!" When Buscemi drives away in an open convertible, Russell actually rides the gigantic wave directly into the villain's front seat. Together they search down Russell's onetime male partner-in-crime, now a transsexual party doll living aboard the Queen Mary, played by Pam Grier (who must have quite a mortgage to feed to have taken this role). Not believing that his bud's now a she, Russell runs his hand up, up, up Grier's innermost thigh and pulls out--no! yes!--a loaded revolver (discuss meaning amongst yourselves).
There is, as they say, much more: the cast flying on hang gliders over a bankrupt faux-Disneyland (in the film's only good line, Buscemi explains, "That thing in Paris killed them"); a climactic shootout featuring animated gunfire even toddlers would snort at on a Saturday morning cartoon show; Corraface biting deeply into Russell's bloody wound (yum). It all ends, as you'd hoped, with Russell peevishly using the doomsday weapon to shut down every source of energy on the entire Earth. We're told that all the technology of the past is lost forever. Including, we hope, any machine capable of projecting a surviving print of this movie.
Rating: -
Well if you have ever been to L.A. then you know it is a place to run from. Yep you saw what they did to old Reginal Denney down there after viewing what, ten seconds of a 34 minute film? Since then 'ol Rodney has been to prison but that was after two more DUI's and stuff. Anyways about the movie, it is a documentary that is complete with smog, smokey choke filled air and lots of gangs and violence.
Worst thing they ever did down there was take the guns away from the good people, but hey whatever. Compton and Watts are shown with a tantalizing high regard in all their trashy wonder.
Kurt Russell is Snake! Snake has to find a way out of this place because you know if the dinosaurs did not survive the Labrea Tar pits, and the Rams and Raiders left then you know it is just a bad place to be. Not a good place to be from and certainly not a good place to visit.
They should have a warning sign at the city limits that says "nothing to see here move along now people" hahaha.
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