Subject: REVIEW: ESCAPE FROM L.A. (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Serdar Yegulalp)
Date: 18 Feb 1997 15:52:58 GMT

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.
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[email-masked]                                       EFNet IRC: GinRei
http://serdar.home.ml.org                          another worldly device...
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