Call Him Snake: Escape From L.A. (1996)

Back in April, on the 20th in fact, I watched Escape from New York. Today I finish the adventure by watching Escape from L.A. After I watched the first film, twitter user, and all around awesome dude @Bobafettjm asked me if I was going to also watch Escape from L.A. and of course I said I was as I had planned on finishing the series. It took me a while, but I've finally gotten my hands on the film and watched it today. I'm actually pretty surprised to see that it took them 15 years to make the sequel. This made me more hopeful for the special effects, since they were pretty dated in the first film. Hit the jump for more Snake and we'll see how it compares to the first film!


The story of this film is pretty much the exact same story as Escape from New York, which is a real shame. I'm sure someone could have come up with more than just another fetch quest on a giant island jail. He has to get a small tech device, and this time it's the President's daughter lost on the island instead of the President himself, and they inject him with a poison instead of a bomb this time. Back to back, it's really pretty lame from a story stand point. Every single element from the first film is just replaced with something else. There was a cage fight to the death with baseball bats? Well how about this time we see him play basketball... in a cage... and he'll DIE if he's not good enough. *Shock* No... wait... I just realized that was completely stupid.

As for those awesome special effects I was hoping for? I was half satisfied and half horrified. The opening scene showing a huge earthquake which was actually really cool and the effects on that were pretty good. A lot of them looked practical with some CG to help out and it wasn't too bad. But then very shortly after they had a scene that was fully CG rendered with helicopters flying around with search lights and it was just terrible. Absolutely terrible. Why God? Why? The effects were generally hit and miss throughout the rest of the movie, but when they missed, they didn't even hit the bulls-eye, and actually strayed so far off course they killed a bystander. When they hit, they were still only 90's effects and still a little hard to take.

Can we stop at the grocery store? I need to pick up apples and eye-patch cleaner.

One of the things I really liked about the first film was the collection of character actors in the cast. This time around we get a nice smattering, with some really great ones too. Kurt Russell still makes a great Snake Plissken, but he didn't seem to have as many one liners, or even lines, as in Escape from New York. He was still good though and exactly how I remembered Snake to be. I quite liked Peter Fonda as the tsunami surfer, and Steve Buscemi was completely great as "Map to the Stars" Eddie. He's hard to recognize, but Bruce Campbell is even in this movie as the surgery obsessed doctor where Snake meets Taslima, played by the beautiful Valeria Golino. I actually wish we got to spend more time with both of these last two characters. The last thing I'd like to say, is that it was really weird seeing Uncle Ben as the President of the US.

The action was frequently awesome and the gun-play was quite a bit better than Escape from New York. Sometimes the wacky nature of some of the action set-pieces was a little too over the top though. The surfing scene, and the never-ending-hang gliders sections come to mind. Of course, when you later describe these scenes to your friends they'll just become stuff of legend and hilarious and unbelievably awesome sounding than they actually are in the movie. They're still fun to watch though.

Snake gets to surf on a tsunami down a canal and he jumps from his surfboard onto that car which he carjacks!

In the end I have a really hard time deciding which film is better. Both have their good qualities and bad qualities. Escape from L.A. is way more over the top, but I have the impression that Escape from New York was more of an adventure film as they seemed to go more places and you saw more of the city. The shootouts were better in L.A. but then it also had the completely unoriginal story ripped off from New York. It's really a tough call. I'm sure if you liked the first though, you'll probably enjoy this one, at least in part. I think for me, Escape from New York just edges this one out due to 100% less death basketball.