Escape from New York was a 1981 cult action movie that impressed people with its fun and overly extreme concept, featuring enough 80s clichés and mindless violence for people to sink their action-hungry teeth and trick people into counting this bare-bones action flick as a staple of the genre. It was given a sequel in 1996 travelling all the way from the streets of New York to the streets of L.A. to try and recapturing the similar reaction. However, being released in a time where sequel was essentially a code for ‘’same movie again but with different title to make more money” as well as coming out during the overly cautious less action-friendly 90s era, it’s no surprise that this project crashed and burned. Like clockwork and déjà vu, the totalitarian futuristic world of ‘’2003’’ is again hijacked when the President of the US (played by Cliff Robertson) loses his daughter named Utopia (played by AJ Langer), when she crashes into the closed off area of LA, where all the criminals and others with ‘’terrible crimes’’  that don’t match with traditional values instated in this world (which include following a different religion or even just eating meat) are detained and left to die. Snake Plissken (played again by Kurt Russell) is again called in and given a chance to redeem his life sentence by being forced to go onto the island and retrieve a black box that Utopia stole which is a remote for a satellite which apparently has the ability to shut off all electronic power in the world. Upon arriving, he is forced to combat Cuervo Jones (played by Georges Corraface), a Peruvian Shining Path revolutionary who has brought together an invasion of force of third-world nations and is planning to attack the U. S, with Snake needing to rely on old and new allies formed within this mad house in order to prevent this from happening. While the first is arguably pretty basic and not the strongest film in terms of personality, its sequel takes everything that didn’t work in the first and explodes it to new levels of awful. Nothing in this movie is effective, even by a stupid corny action movie standards; its dull, its overly obvious with its morals, its annoyingly bland and long, the acting is wooden, the action is boring, and the plot is literally the exact same thing. Coming out way too late and in a time period of awful summer movies, Escape from New York should have stayed a stand-alone.

It’s impossible to talk about this film’s issues without discussing the obvious flagship problem, in that everything is almost copy and paste the exact same from the original. This film had most of the writing and directing team attached, with John Carpenter returning to direct, but with Debra Hill and even star of the film, Kurt Russell, helping him in the writing department, so that already sets up how this became an issue, but even in comparison to their previous example, this is pretty embarrassing. Bad sequels are usually known for repeating what the previous film did, but this movie doesn’t even have the guts to hide how little it is trying. The location name is different, and the goal is different, but beside those two aspects, literal scenes can be mirrored, characters are either stock, palette swaps of previous examples, or just flat-out the same, the interior of L.A. is the exact same to New York, and the direction and outcome leads to the exact same conclusion, leaving everything feeling heavily predictable, weightless, empty, and dull. Even taking that out of it, it repeats everything from the first movie so terribly that it couldn’t even repeat itself correctly. Choices are made that are either too cartoonishly stupid or completely nonsensical that it can never be taken seriously as a straight action movie, but the movie has next to nothing that’s charming or stupidly awesome so it can’t be seen as a goofy action movie either. The writing isn’t even trying to be subtle with how much it hammers in how much American sucks, to the dramatic reasons why people are imprisoned on the island, to the villains being such cut-outs and portrayed as goofily dramatic as possible, to the mere fact that the president was willing to kill his own daughter just to keep power over the world, takes what was originally an overly subtle message in the first to a punch in your face obvious message in the sequel. Since it’s already a repeat and a bad one at that, the movie feels like a complete slog to get through because the audience knows everything that’s going to happen. The movie barely feels like a sequel; going in without knowing firsthand, it could be mistaken for its own film but one that lacks a lot of essential storytelling elements. The movie is so conflicted in tone that it’s never clear what it’s trying to be; a straightforward action movie, a goofy 80s flick, a commentary film, a travel movie, an action thriller, its tries to be all of them and fails at every single one.

The characters for the first movie weren’t anything special and were clearly just there to either shout orders, kill people or be the one being killed and to the first one’s credit, it managed to do those clichés fairly well. Here everyone is either a stereotype or a cartoon character, all done in the worst possible ways imaginable. The first one had simple characters, but they were decently acted and had that 80s touch that made people at least want to follow them, whereas almost every character in this is incredibly bland or flat-out annoying. Kurt Russell is still doing his harsh voice and cold stare from the first movie, and he does it fine enough but not enough to warrant a second time around. The side characters mirror old characters and are incredibly wooden in delivery, even with a lot of recognizable names attached. People like Stacy Keach, Valeria Golino and Bruce Campbell leave no impression, Peter Fonda feels completely out-of-place and miscast as this surfer enthusiast named Pipeline, Pam Grier has a really weird sound filter to her voice (which becomes more clear when you discover she’s supposed to be a trans woman), and people like Steve Buscemi are passable for what he has to do, but is stuck doing his usual shtick instead of anything different. Gorges Corraface as the villain is incredibly forgettable and poorly acted, not leaving anything memorable from a plan or even personality standpoint (if you’re going to be bland, at least ‘crazy action villain’ bland). Cliff Robertson as the president is such a pathetic stereotype and so clearly a riff on the current president of the time (that being Bill Clinton) that the SNL Donald Trump comes out with more dignity and respect than this display. It’s not funny, it’s not clever and it’s so blatant and childish that the commentary goes over everyone’s head, and it just feels like they clearly hated the president at the time and created the most cartoonishly paranoid and stupid president on film as a form of mockery.

Even by dumb action movie standards in the 90s, this movie has next to no action that’s worth remembering. While the first had very little action that was really distinct or even that interesting either, it had the aggressive tone and enough of a body count to keep the audience engaged and clear with its narrative direction. Since this movie has a very small body count and next to no interesting looking fights in it, it leaves a massive gap in the works and leaves this action movie feeling incredibly empty. There’s also a good helping of CGI used during this movie, clearly just to jump on the bandwagon of every movie featuring some computer effects at the time, even when they really weren’t required. Going from an original movie that relied on its devastated landscape to at least leave a memorable impression, to a film that only on occasion shows off its environment against some truly terrible effects is not something to be pleased with. These are pretty bad but for the time it could be given a pass, but a particular scene involving a tsunami is pretty ridiculous to watch and can leave you pretty baffled at how embarrassing it looks even for back then. Some of the sets  are at least done okay, and whenever there’s a sunset in the distance and it shows the destroyed city, it does have a somewhat interesting visual appeal to it. The music is also weirdly not too bad in this most likely coming from Carpenter (who helped compose the music) along with famous composer and conductor, Shirley Walker, being attached to the project. It’s nothing phenomenally unique or memorable sounding, but for what the film is, it sounds appropriately grizzled and hard-core, yet energized and time-appropriate to work in the genre.

Escape from LA is a cataclysmic bombshell of a film equivalent to its own mindless hollow utopia. Instead of improving upon its previous film’s flaws, it magnifies them and kills what little good will the first had. The first one is watchable and works fine enough given the time it was made, whilst this movie came way too late after the first, tried nothing but do the same thing again, and doesn’t work no matter what direction it looked at. Its horribly rehashed, its bland to watch, the commentary is beyond obvious, the acting is mostly wooden, the characters are boring cut-outs, the action is forgettable, the writing is stupid, and the overall picture is just a waste of time. Not even worth a viewing as a stupid bad movie, it is better left forgotten about as most others would have no likely done. This is an island that is definitely worth escaping from as quick as possible.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,