Movie Review : Escape from L.A. (1996)

There is an archaic beauty to Snake Plissken franchise. There is no way such a movie would be sold to a major Hollywood studio nowadays, even less to an audience*. No, Snake is a relic of a long gone era where the entertainment industry still had the balls to propose movies that were different and most important, that didn't take themselves seriously at all. Escape from L.A is pulp fiction so over-the-top, it's worthy of the pages of Man's Life Magazine (a publication Occidental society misses dearly). There's a good chance that you've never seen anything like Snake Plissken's adventures.

That's a good thing because unlike most post-apocalyptic science-fiction movies nowadays, it knows exactly what it's trying to offer. A world so over-the-top dystopian that it will make you smile and put Mad Max in therapy. I re-watched Escape from L.A last week for the third time in fifteen years and you know what? It's ridiculously far fetched, the CGI is laughable, the setting is so implausible it makes my head hurt, but goddamit, it's a great pulp/sci-fi if I've ever seen/read one.

Escape from L.A is eerily similar to 1981's Escape from New York, but don't be fooled, it IS a sequel. Snake Plissken (Russell) just had a shit luck for getting caught in patterns. This time, he's getting caught by the army** and threatened with deportation to Los Angeles, where the criminals to the new "moral" America are getting deported. After the great earthquake of 2000, L.A. has physically detached from the U.S and now serves as a penitentiary colony.

In order to regain his freedom, Snake has to actually GO to Los Angeles and retrieve a package that was stolen from his president by his own daughter, Utopia (A.J Langer). The package is in the hands of a dangerous Che Guevara wannabee named Cuervo Jones (Georges Corraface), who plans to use it to invade the U.S. with other "third world countries", whatever third world means in this universe. Oh and Snake has to kill Utopia too. Because the president (Cliff Robertson) is a control freak who can't accept rebellion from anybody, not even his own kin. I know, it doesn't make much sense when said like that, but it's fucking awesome.

I've reviewed Colombiana earlier this month and it has one major similarity with Escape from L.A: both movies will fuck with your suspension of disbelief very hard. What makes Escape from L.A very enjoyable where Colombiana is not, is that it's not a movie that wants you to believe anything. It doesn't care if your disbelief is suspended or not in order to enjoy the story. The details that don't make any sense actually add to the wacky atmosphere and make the movie even more enjoyable. For example, the Los Angeles residents are banned for moral crimes, like "being Muslim in North Dakota" or being from a different ethnicity. Petty crimes, right? Yet, they turned L.A in an absolute war zone full of demented warlords in a little more than a decade. Or even more precise, when Snake is chasing Cuervo Jones' car on a stolen motorcycle, he tries to distance himself from the bodyguards by doing a wheelie. It doesn't make any sense, but who cares? It's badass.

In 1996, Escape from L.A was probably at the cutting edge of the technology, but it beat father time as the CGI equivalent of the zipper-in-the-back monster movies of the fifties. It's made out of pure passion and it has the organic charm of a comic book. Kurt Russell is overplaying the badass archetype so bad, he's actually fun to watch. With a cast of characters with names such as Map-To-The-Stars Eddie, Carjack Malone and Cuervo Jones, it helps giving it even more of a charm. Don't expect it to revolutionize your view of dystopian science-fiction, because Escape from L.A doesn't even pretend to do that. Watch it expecting some laughter and over-the-top action, like in a B movie from the eighties***. It's a story that has a fun and coherent madness to offer you. It's not great cinema, but it's a great work of art. Nostalgia has been kind to this one. It has a rightful place in your DVD/Blu-Ray collection alongside the likes of Cobra and Commando.

7.9/10

* I know there's been another Snake movie in 2010, but it wasn't the same thing. It was a straight-to-dvd knockoff.

You can't have Snake Plissken without Kurt Russell, unless it's an animated feature with Russell voicing his trademark character.

** Again

*** In all fairness, it started as a B movie in the eighties. L.A just lives up to the spirit of its franchise very well.