ESCAPE FROM L.A.
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: A giddy, wild sci-fi farce that keys in on a ROBOCOP-style view of the future and contains more laughs than you might expect.
The original ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK was a halfway-serious futuristic thriller that turned Manhattan Island into a giant maximum security prison, and then dumped the President of the United States into it. To rescue him, we had one-eyed Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, who up until then had a roster mostly of Disney movies), and the combination of fairly unique ingredients made the movie a long-standing pulp-SF-and-fratboy favorite.
ESCAPE FROM L.A. is not simply a sequel, but a sly self-parody that has endless fun inverting the same conventions it seems born to exploit. There are some scenes that are just impossible to take straight: how about Peter Fonda teaching Snake how to catch a tube in what looks like the post-apocalypse version of Big Sur? Or a basketball game to the death? Or a plastic surgery clinic filled with Beverly Hills zombies?
The plot is the thinnest of excuses onto which to graft one weirdly hilarious sequence after another. The President (a far-right lunatic) drafts Plissken for a mission: rescue his daughter, who's absconded with the control block for a doomsday device. She's hijacked Air Force Three and sent it screaming right into the heart of L.A. -- which in this world, has not only been forcibly seperated from the rest of the country by an earthquake, but is a dumping ground for "undesirables" (i.e., anyone who would look even slightly out of place in a Norman Rockwell painting). You have the choice of deportation or electrocution at the border. They also have a nifty little coercion for Snake: a fast-breeding disease that will kill him in eight hours unless he gets back to them with the goods. Nice of them to think of everything.
We're in overdrive right from the start. Snake is jammed into a one-man sub and shot at L.A., and skims across all manner of submerged and trashed landmarks. If you live in the area, you're guaranteed a few laughs at seeing your least favorite eyesores in ruins. (The biggest eyesore of all is at the very end of the movie, along with a line of dialogue that will convulse all comers. I am not ruining that one.)
EFLA is almost like a slightly bigger-budgeted version of the kinds of SF movies that used to come out more often, like REPO MAN and ANDROID. While EFLA isn't nearly as much of a real cult item as the former or as emotionally involving as the latter, it's nice to see that John Carpenter still has a good soupcon of the anarchist/indie-producer spirit in him. The last scene in the movie should be a clear indication of that -- it leaves us wide open for endless possibilities. Like, say, ESCAPE FROM PLANET EARTH. Heh heh heh.
Three out of four eyepatches.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://serdar.home.ml.org another worldly device...
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