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Escape From New York - Special Edition DVD
Starring: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau
Director: John Carpenter
Reviewed by Chris Ching
When it comes to child stars, most of them end up dead, in jail, or on Maury Povich (or all three). For every Ron Howard you have twenty Gary Colemans. One actor who successfully made the leap from the wide eyes and smile school of child acting intact is Kurt Russell. For those of you born in the era of Rubik's Cube and My Little Pony, Russel was a bona fide child star in Disney fare like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969) and The Barefoot Executive (1971). No one ever pictured him being much more until two TV movie roles, real life sniper Charles Joseph Whitman in The Deadly Tower (1975) and the real life King of Rock-and-Roll Elvis Presley in Elvis (1979), demonstrated that Russel had staying power. This was cemented in 1980 with his greatest role of Snake Plissken in John Carpenter's Escape From New York.
 Two decades and a bazillion grungy futuristic movies later have somewhat dulled it's power, but Escape From New York is still a first class popcorn flick. Here's the plot: In 1988 with crime rates reaching epidemic proportions, a 50 foot containment wall is built around the city of New York as the Big Apple becomes the Big House for the whole Unites States. With all bridges and waterways mined and the newly formed Unites States Police force permanently surrounding the city, the prison's only rule of "Once you go in, you don't come out" is deadly accurate.
Except of course you're Snake Plissken, a once decorated soldier now criminal outlaw, who must rescue the captured President of the United States (Donald Pleasance) from the millions of criminals running amok in the guard-less prison/city. Snake, facing a New York sentence himself, is promised amnesty if he can get the Pres out in time to make a vital peace conference, but he only has 24 hours to do it. If he can't get out in time, the peace conference will lead to war and the poison tablets the Police Chief has cagily implanted into Snake will dissolve, instantly killing him.
Tough, cynical, gritty, able to wear an eye patch without eliciting laughs, Kurt Russel is the epitome of cool as Snake. With his "who gives a s**t attitude" to life, he was a perfect harbinger for the bigger than life killing machine heroes of 80s action movies. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, nicely walking the line between tongue in cheek and self parody. Especially fun to watch is Lee Van Cleef, the villain in so many spaghetti westerns. go toe to toe with Russell doing his best Clint Eastwood impersonation. Their fiery exchanges are pure Fanboy nirvana. Special Token Freak Award to Frank Doubleday as Romero, a character best described as the result of man on reptile love.
Carpenter's low budget auteur style finds an ideal playground on the streets of New York. The art design perfectly accentuates the grim tone of the movie. This is one New York you don't want to spend New year's Eve in, and its hard not to see Escape From New York's influence on the look of Blade Runner, Terminator (Jim Cameron, in an early film job, worked on Escape's visual effects), and other futuristic action movies that followed. It should be also noted that Carpenter not only wrote and directed Escape From New York, but composed the film's eerily atmospheric score.
It's a little disconcerting now to watch the scene where Snake land his plane on top of the now toppled Twin Towers. And with Isaac Hayes playing the Duke "A Number One", the ruler of New York, I keep on waiting for the rest of the cast to call him Chef.
Escape From New York was followed in 1995 by the piss ant of a sequel Escape From L.A. which shamefully rehashed the former's plot with less than stellar results. Will Snake Plissken escape from another ravaged American city of the future? Only time and rising crime rates will tell.
THE EXTRAS: Escape From New York has a large number of special features, but they pale in quality to the ones accompanying Russell and Carpenter's The Thing DVD. Aside from a nice making of documentary (Who knew Escape From New York was shot in St. Louis?) and two audio commentaries, you get an unnecessary Snake Plissken collage and a worthless slideshow about how they make the Snake Plissken comic book (You get a mini-comic with the DVD). Even worse, the much vaunted alternative opener is something you'll watch once and never again. Pooh pooh.
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(2 out of 4 stars)
