Escape From New York (1981)

I'll be honest, Portal 2 has taken up a lot of my time, but I just finished it and now we can get back to the movies! For today's movie I picked Escape from New York. I think I had heard somewhere once that while loved at the time, this is one of those movies that didn't stand the test of time. Even if that might be the case, Snake Plisskin (I thought he was dead) is an iconic character and I wanted to see it for myself. So let's hit the jump and see what director John Carpenter thought the future would look like.


In the future (1988) crime in America has grown by 400%. They turn all of Manhattan Island into a giant prison for the entire country. It's now 1997, and Snake Plisskin (hey I heard he was dead) is a war hero who tried to rob a bank once he got home and is being sent to New York to live the rest of his life in prison. Just before he's fully processed, Air Force One is crashed into the buildings of New York by terrorists. Snake is the only man the warden has that could even hope to pull off a rescue of this nature, so they gear him up with the promise of freedom if he can pull it off.

I'm really starting to like watching these older movies, and recognizing more and more faces. This time around I recognized the warden, who is played by Lee Van Cleef. We last saw him in For a Few Dollars More and The Good The Bad and the Ugly. Also, a supporting character shows up about half-way through the movie with a fantastic... on-screen presence. She's Adrienne Barbeau, and I recognized her from The Cannonball Run as the female racer in the hot pink racing outfit. To round out the supporting characters we have Cabby, played by Ernest Borgnine, who I saw in The Poseidon Adventure, and the bad guy is played by the late Isaac Hayes who many may remember as Chef from South Park.

Kurt Russell is of course the bad ass Snake Plisskin (I thought he was dead). Everything about Snake screams anti-hero, and he totally sells it. There may be a little bit of cheesiness to the role, but it's expected, and probably wouldn't work without it. He was just a great character, and it's no wonder he was the inspiration for the Solid Snake character in the Metal Gear videogames.

Call me Snake

The gun-play and the action wasn't all that bad. It wasn't great, and the whole movie REALLY shows its age, but it wasn't bad. The whole movie really is a mixed bag to be honest. Sometimes the guns were decent, sometimes they looked extra fake. There's a cage fight at one point in the movie which just kinda drags for a while, but then they're given nail bats which look really brutal, and ended up having a final blow that briefly shocked me and made me go "OOOhhh!" so that's pretty good.

Possibly the most I've seen attached to the end of an uzzi

Where Escape from New York suffers the most is the computer and "high tech" look they try to pull off. It was like watching original episodes of Star Trek with banks and banks of blinking lights on plastic panels. All the government's stuff just looked really dated. The post-apocalyptic look of Manhattan, however, didn't disappoint me terribly, but I think I had gotten into the groove set by all the silly computers of the first 15 minutes of the movie.

In the end, I didn't think Escape from New York was as terrible as I thought it was going to be, but it certainly shows it's age. Kurt Russell is awesome, and I'm a sucker for post apocalyptic movies. Part of my enjoyment was just seeing all these old actors that I've seen fairly recently thanks to this blog. So do I recommend it? Sure, why not. It's cheesy early 80's action with a super memorable character and a cool, if tired, premise. There's a lot that's gone wrong with the movie, but I think there's just enough in the good category that it just barely eeks out and outweighs the bad. No need to rush out and search for it though, nevertheless, I can't deny that I enjoyed it.