Escape from L.A.

Rating:
Summary: corney at parts, but funny. Just a fun movie.
Review: This movie has very unrealistic, but fun to watch. This is not a movie to take cerious. Just try to sit back, relax, and enjoy this fun and exciting movie.

Rating:
Summary: Snake is back . . .
Review: Snake Plisskin returns to beat the clock, grab the goods, and get out of LA before the Plutoxin-7 virus he's been injected with, kicks in. Totally tongue-in-cheek, this movie wasn't meant as high drama; it's an action comedy! Full of Kurt doing his best "Dirty Harry" improv, there are enough of shoot-outs with LA gangs to satisfy even the most die-hard action flick fans. Kurt doesn't budge an inch, bat an eye, or back down in the nearly continuous, start-to-finish action scenes. The DVD transfer is good, and the sound level consistent. A must-have for action flick fans.

Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: Most people say that this is a bad film. But it ain't. It is really fuuny and highly enjoyable. Some parts are quite memorable and, strangely enough, some lighthearted music. I have never seen a film with an ending like it.

Rating:
Summary: Never should have been attempted!!
Review: Why? Escape from New York was one of the best cult films ever and now, after all these years , a piggy-back attempt is made. The plot - awful. The characters - awful. Special Effects - awful. I wouldn't watch this trash again even if my cable was out and this was the only tape I had!!

Rating:
Summary: Snake Plissken is back - this time it's time in L.A.
Review: The year is 2013. Los Angeles is separated from the mainland after the big one in 2000. In the New Moral America, all people that break any of the moral laws are deported to L.A. The President's daughter has stolen a doomsday device from the government and has fled to L.A. Snake Plissken has been "recruited" by the American government to go into L.A., take back the device, and kill the daughter. What ensues is race against time as a poison counts down inside Snake's body as he races to complete his mission. Snake is the greatest character of American movie history. No one can conjure up greater remarks than Snake. He's the most dangerous man in the world, but he's not a killing machine. Snake has his own agenda, but he is willing to help those in need. Escape from L.A. is a ride throughout the city. From Beverly Hills to Anaheim, Snake encounters it all. He meets up with unsavory characters from Map to the Stars Eddie to ganglord Cuervo Jones. Snake encounters everything from the Surgeon General to a deadly game of basketball. What starts out as a simple mission ends up being that of global consequence. The ending is possibly one of the best of all time. It brings to you a sense of justification of Snake's views and his actions throughout the movie. The ending will blow you out of the water.

Rating:
Summary: "Escape From L.A." is more of the same!
Review: This sequel to Carpenter's 1980 cult classic "Escape From New York" is more or less a bigger budget retelling of the same story. Russell is back as Snake Plitsken, the one-eyed outlaw hero who once again will be offered a full pardon if he goes into a criminal-infested prison that used to be a major American city. This time, he has to confiscate a "doomsday device" from a sadistic terrorist who is using it to blackmail the United States. Despite the more than fifteen years that seperate the two films, this one really doesn't offer much on "New York" aside from a cool underwater sequence involving a certain Universal Studios attraction and a couple of cool special effects scenes. Russell is still great as the over-the-top anti-hero and the addition of some cool character actors keeps it from being a total waste of time but this script is seriously lacking. This one has "retread" written all over it. There is about as much of a difference in the stories as there is in the titles.

Rating:
Summary: shocked
Review: I never thought that Kurt Russell would make a sequal to the first Escape movie
not only did he do a great job reprising his role as Snake Plisskin. but he made the second movie more moviing. more touching. more funny at times. both movies I have on dvd. they're both timeless. I could watch them again and again. Snake's lines and dialogue never get bored. like where the guy says get to the chase plisskin. and Kurt goes "Snake , call me snake" and the guy smiles. brilliant cinematogrophy
amazing shooting locations
brilliant plot
amazing ending
see this movie by renting it if you haven't already

Rating:
Summary: Under appreciated minor classic 3 1/2 stars
Review: Sequels used to be about remaking the same film again and again (remember "Friday The 13th" or "Nightmare on Elm Street"?)with minor variations so the audience gets their fix. John Carpenter, Kurt Russell and Debra Hill inverted the paradigmn reprising the best elements from "Escape from New York" while introducing a heavy dose of satire aimed squarely at the Moral Majority and groups of that nature. While not as memorable as that film, "Escape from L. A." takes perfect aim at liberal Hollywood, the conservative religious right, sequels and skewers them all dead on most of the time.

Snake Plissken is back in trouble. Captured again he's put into the service of national security against his will. It seems a device that can detonate orbital nuclear devices has been stolen by the President's daughter and delivered into the hands of a self styled rebel leader named Cuervo Jones (George Corraface)in what's left of Southern California. Cuervo plans on using this device against the United States. Plissken is sent to the island of Los Angeles to retreive the device. Yes, folks the BIG ONE finally hit and a large part of the Los Angeles basin dropped into the ocean like a ten ton weight while the remainder floats off the coast of the United States making the perfect place to deport people who don't have high moral fiber or generally tick off the President for life (Cliff Robertson in a twisted performance). Infected by a deadly designer virus that makes Ebola seem like the flu, Snake has no choice but to take the job of retrieving. Malloy (Stacy Keach stepping in for the late Lee Van Cleef)and Brazen (the beautiful Michelle Forbes late of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", "Homicide: Life on the Streets" and the second season of "24")provide Snake with his only link to the outside world.

Along the way Snake meets surfers (Peter Fonda), the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills (Bruce Campbell in a hilarious role that truly is the highlight of the movie)in pursuit of the device. Oh and once again Snake has one of those huge digital watches attached to his wrist to remind him his days are numbered if he doesn't get the device back in time. Filled with great cameos by Steve Buscemi (as Map to the Stars Eddie), B-movie queen Pam Grier (as Hershe Las Palmas), Italian beauty Valerie Golino, the late Paul Bartel, Issac Hayes (in a cameo) and Robert Carradine "Escape from L.A." just might be Carpenter's most undervalued film (along with the great satire "They Live").

The weakest link in the film turns out to be the uneven visual effects done by Disney's Buena Vista Visual Effects. Some of the opticals look great particularly the scenes where Los Angeles gets hit by the 9.6 earthquake. The sequences involving the mini-sub and some of the helicopters look as if they were taken from computer games. While computer graphics were still developing at the time, I'm surprised that Disney's effects house wasn't able to come up with more convincing visuals for this sequence. Still, while they aren't what they could be they're not the focus of the story either and are a pretty minor problem. Many of the best effects work quite well. The production design by Lawrence G. Paull ("Blade Runner", "Back to the Future", "Predator 2")gives the film a much bigger look than the budget the film had (it cost roughly $50 million to make including the marketing portion of the budget). A bit of trivia about the film. Russell appears wearing the same costume he had for the first film at the beginning. Russell also made all the basketball shots seen in the climatic game himself.

Presented in its original widescreen format with a trailer as the only extra, this was released when Paramount was playing catch up in releasing product for the DVD market. The image quality is exceptionally good with great color reproduction and a nearly flawless print (particularly when compared to the remastered re-release of "Escape from New York")with a nice 5.1 sound mix.

It's too bad this hasn't been reissued with extras (such as a commentary from Carpenter and Russell and one or two featurettes. Heck, there's got to be a promo piece somewhere in Paramount's vault about this as I seem to remember one being released to promote it)because, while isn't quite up to "Escape from New York", "Escape from L.A." is still a memorable sequel with enough satire, parody and humor laced moments to keep fans of the original happy. Hopefully one of these days this minor Carpenter classic will get the re-evaluation it deserves.

Rating:
Summary: Terribly, terribly misunderstood Carpenter film
Review: You know, ESCAPE FROM L.A. isn't "bad," per se, so much as it is just terribly misunderstood.

Let me explain...

Most people thought ESCAPE FROM L.A. was going to give us a bigger, badder Snake Plissken in a bigger, badder Escape film.

I don't think that wasn't what Carpenter and Russell were trying to do, at all.

I believe that the secret lies in the new commentary track Carpenter and Russell recorded for the ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK special edition.

They go on and on and on about how most sequels are never more than poor note-for-note rehashes of the original film. This, by itself, wouldn't have meant anything without another comment in which Russell observes that, in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, they allowed Snake Plissken a moment to just sit and catch his breath, and how action films these days never just let the hero grab a seat for a few minutes.

With those two anecdotes in mind, it finally hit me while watching ESCAPE FROM L.A.

There was a scene in ESCAPE FROM L.A. in which Snake just takes a moment to grab a seat and catch his breath...and, blam! I "got" it! ESCAPE FROM L.A. is an *ironic inside joke*; it is *supposed* to be a poor note-for-note rehash of the original film.

Carpenter meant for ESCAPE FROM L.A. to be a tongue-in-cheek "bad" sequel, but Carpenter simply was not capable of executing the desperately-needed irony.

QED

Think about it. From the nearly identical opening sequence to the shots of Snake entering L.A. to the "not-really-a-love-interest" love interest, etc., etc., etc., it's all largely the same, beat-for-beat.

All that's absent is the *irony*, which would give the film it's otherwise missing motivation.

Rating:
Summary: Camp-tacular Film
Review: What I cannot understand for the life of me why Kurt Russel and John Carpenter decided to revisit the charater Snake Plissken from Escape From New York. That movie was fun, it had an interesting story, and entertaining characters. It was bad, but good bad. The kind of bad you can watch and enjoy, knowing you don't have to take the film seriously. Escape From LA is more of the same stuff. The basic plot: The USA is a basic theocracy run by a man who declared himself President for life. The President's daughter steals a high-tech weapon and flees to Los Angeles, which has been seperated from the mainland by a massive earthquake. It became a deportation zone for undesireables, and now is a staging ground for an attack on the US. Plissken is called in once again to sneak in and recover the weapon before it gets used. Same old, same old.
Not only is the plot the same as in Escape From New York, the characters are similar. Even Russel's acting hasn't changed from the original. This makes the movie simply look like a revamped version of the original, shot woth better film.
This is an OK movie to do every once and awhile. Its nothing special, just really campy. Kurt Russel's performance isn't spectacualr, but what would expect for the role. Steve Buschemi (proving once again he'll be in any movie) plays a sleazy dealer in LA, who is either helping or tricking Plissken. He's a bright point to the movie, and makes it slightly more entertaining.
All and all a mediocre sequal to a camp classic. Its kind of fun but can't meet up to the standard the original provides. If you must buy this movie don't take it too seriously. Its campy fun for a 90's film, but you would be better off watching Escape From New York. Not really a movie you'll find yourself watching over and over again. I would recommend watching it when it comes on TV, rather then paying money for the DVD.