Trade It in for Twinkies: Escape from L. A.

The Review

When Escape from L.A. opens, we find Snake Plissken [Kurt Russell] in handcuffs. This time, his crimes have earned him exile from the United States. But lucky for Snake, his second arrest coincides with a new national security crisis, and the President [Cliff Robertson] wants to make a deal. Our anti-hero can remain a free citizen, his record expunged, if he agrees to retrieve a mysterious black box hijacked by terrorists. The unscrupulous President has Snake infected with Plutoxin 7, a deadly designer virus, and then dangles the antidote as additional motivation for Snake to accept the mission.

The black box is somewhere on the island of Los Angeles. An earthquake has separated the city from the mainland, and now LA is the dumping ground for the country’s undesirables. We learn that the government deports criminals, prostitutes, atheists, and runaways; we can surmise that it ships off homosexuals as well, for the uniforms the national police wear are so lacking in style that only someone who rates 0, exclusively heterosexual, on the Kinsey scale could have designed them. Without the insignia on the sleeves of her jacket, we might mistake Officer Brazen [the tall and lovely Michelle Forbes] as an Oompa Loompa moonlighting from the Chocolate Factory.

One President’s undesirables are another man’s good time, and we hope that the exiled citizens have transformed the rubble of LA into a party place populated by free-thinking nonconformists. We imagine that the Queer Eye boys have coordinated the decor and dress, that vegan pothead surfers have lovingly landscaped the city with marijuana and soybean. With temperature averages in the 70s and the Pacific lapping the shores, we expect a budding utopia where fit and trendy inhabitants travel by eco-friendly skateboard.

But writer/director John Carpenter prefers graffiti to gardens, car skids and breaking glass to hippies strumming acoustic guitars, so his LA is a bleak and dangerous place. If the prisoners in Escape from New York scurried among the ruins like cockroaches, the denizens of LA are more akin to herd animals who squeeze the triggers of their abundant guns as soon as they hear the explosive “bleating” of fellow sheep.

Snake navigates this difficult terrain where he meets inhabitants who provide knowledge or obstacles on his quest for the black box. Noteworthy is Taslima [Valeria Golino], a woman Snake encounters while in the clutches of the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills [Bruce Campbell]. Yes, despite the devolution on the island, LA residents still feed their vanity with plastic surgery, even if they must visit a Dr. Frankenstein dealing in purloined body parts. After their escape, Taslima delivers a thoughtful speech about the nature of freedom, her insight shattered when a stray bullet unceremoniously ends her life.

Disappointing are Map to the Stars Eddie [Steve Buscemi], Snake’s ride, and Cuervo Jones [George Corraface], the island’s power figure. Neither conveys the over-the-top creepiness and camp of their predecessors in Escape from New York. Unlike Cabbie [Ernest Borgnine], whose sweet, simple facade masked dark impulses—Cabbie was in the Manhattan prison for a reason, after all—Eddie is just a banal con man. And unlike the Duke [Issac Hayes], a crazy compilation of stereotypes cemented with the chandelier hood ornaments atop his Lincoln, Cuervo Jones is as flat as warm beer. Also missing is a single relationship with the sincere feeling Maggie [Adrienne Barbeau] had for Brain [Harry Dean Stanton].

Of course, the movie is about Snake, who, despite his criminal record, has real charm. Perhaps we forgive his misdeeds because we like his lion’s mane, bad-boy black leather, and dismissive hiss as he negotiates with captors. Perhaps we admire his cool-headed competence in difficult situations, his ability to handle a basketball or a surfboard with the same ease and skill as a gun or a knife. Perhaps we recognize that his desires—make a buck and avoid interference from others—are our own. More likely, we identify with his predicament: Like Snake, we have leaders in government we cannot trust as well as small-minded and manipulative people in our day-to-day lives who want our productivity to benefit them, no matter the cost to us. That Snake can outwit these folks is his real appeal.

Escape from L.A. improves on its predecessor in a number of ways. The special effects are ambitious and effective; we buy that someone can ride a tsunami on a surfboard in pursuit of a speeding vehicle—at least while we are caught in the momentum of the story. And the sound track includes real music, songs by Tool and White Zombie, for example, not just the Carpenter score, which sounds in places like a cellphone getting cooked in a microwave.

The sequel does not satisfy, however. Snake is so self-centered that he does not inspire anyone except Utopia [A. J. Langer], the President’s airhead daughter, to protest his abuse. We keep looking to Brazen to knit her brow and surprise us [as so many of Forbes’ characters do], perhaps drawing her sidearm and blowing away the dumb-ass President, but she remains the loyal officer. At the end of the movie, Snake, who has since learned the black box’s power, concludes that all of humanity needs a reboot. When he decides to screw us all, we question why we liked him in the first place.