Ha ha, it’s me - call me Burl! Yes, I’m
here to review not the first, but the second adventure of Snake Plisskin, which
is to say the time he had to Escape from
L.A.! Now, like just about everybody, I’m very fond of his first go-round, Escape from New York! That’s just a
terrific picture! But I remember going to the theater to see the new one when
it came out back in 1996, and I came reeling out with my brain full of
skunkfire! It was a terrific disappointment!
Watching it again more recently, I found
more to like in the movie, but not much! It’s certainly on the bottom level of
John Carpenter pictures, along with Ghosts
of Mars and The Ward, and so very
remote from the heights of The Thing and Halloween!
Snake Plisskin is still the monocular man
of action we know and love from 1982! It seems there’s another godly hypocrite
in the White House, played by Cliff Robertson in Malone mode, and he’s made L.A., that heathen city, into a dumping
ground for everyone he doesn’t like: atheists and so forth! Ha ha, Los Angeles
is a big city, but I don’t think it could fit everybody this joker doesn’t
like! Ol’ Burl, for example, would be sent there immediately, and I would probably
set up shop in the Academy screening room and just watch movies all day!
Of course Snake has no time for that: he
has to get back some important trinket from Robertson’s rebellious daughter,
who has set up shop with notorious gangster-terrorist Cuervo Jones; and for
Snake there’s a countdown clock (referred to even more insistently than it was
in New York) and gangs to fight, and,
as in the previous picture, a terrific supporting cast! As before, everyone he
meets either knows him or has heard of him, but now, instead of everyone
thinking he was dead, they all thought he’d be taller!
There are also lots of really ropey CGI
trick effects (that shark!) and a lugubrious mise-en-scene that drains the
action scenes of any pizzazz! Oh John, how did it come to this! You’re a
terrific action director! It doesn’t help that so much of the movie plays as a
pale imitation of the earlier movie’s highlights! Instead of gliding onto the
World Trade Center, Snake submarines onto a freeway ramp! When he’s captured by
the bad guys, he doesn’t fight their biggest man in a ring, as he did in New
York; no, he must play basketball! At least the doo-dad he’s after is a mini
disc instead of a tape cassette, ha ha!
The general reduction in amazingness
extends to the supporting cast, which, as I said, is terrific! Just not as terrific! Stacey Keach is fine, but
he’s no Lee Van Cleef! Steve Buscemi is a wonderful actor, but he’s not Harry
Dean Stanton! Peter Fonda is great, but Ernest Borgnine is greater! And George
Corraface is most assuredly no Isaac Hayes! We also get Pam Grier and Bruce
Campbell, wonderful performers both, but somewhat underused here!
On the plus side - and Burl always looks
for that, ha ha! - Kurt Russell doesn’t miss a trick in his Snake Plisskin
shtick! A couple of the fights are pretty good, and there are pleasing ideas or
bits of design lurking in the margins! There’s a little cavalcade of Rick Baker
makeups in the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills scene, which is always nice!
And, as with every movie about the destruction of L.A. made by people who live
there, there’s a certain glee taken in the city’s demise, with potshots aplenty
taken at its ways and its people!
And of course, in its depiction of the demagogic
Robertson, the picture has a certain prescience; enough, maybe, to serve as a
cautionary tale along the line of Sinclair Lewis’s book It Can’t Happen Here! And even at his worst, John Carpenter is
still John Carpenter, and there’s some pleasing carpentry throughout the movie!
I give Escape from L.A. one and a
half full-court free throws!
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