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Escape from L.A.

1996 film by John Carpenter

Escape from L.A., also known as John Carpenter's Escape From L.A., is a 1996 cult film directed by John Carpenter. The sequel to the action film Escape from New York, the film follows war hero Snake Plissken, played by Kurt Russell. It co-stars Steve Buscemi, Stacy Keach, Bruce Campbell and Pam Grier.

Welcome to the human race.
Snake is Back (taglines)

Snake Plissken

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I'm gonna give you assholes a chance. What do you say we play a little Bangkok rules? Nobody draws until this hits the ground. Draw.
 
You got a smoke?
  • Call me Snake.
  • [facing four gunmen at once] I'm gonna give you assholes a chance. What do you say we play a little Bangkok rules? [picks up a tin can] Nobody draws until this hits the ground. You ready? [throws can up, draws, kills all four before it lands[ Draw.

Cuervo Jones

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You may have survived Cleveland. You may have escaped from New York. But this is LA, vato. And you're about to find out that this fucking city can kill anybody!
  • [addressing the crowd at the LA Olympic Auditorium] I promised you tonight was gonna be special. I also promised you one last great spectacle of death in this historic arena. Now you will see that death. I give you, the death of SNAKE PLISSKEN!!! [cheers as Snake is forced into a basketball court; to Snake] Some people think you're already dead, Snake. Some say you never will be. 'Cause you may have survived Cleveland. You may have escaped from New York. But this is LA, vato. And you're about to find out that this fucking city can kill anybody! [more cheers] Game time!! [explains the basketball rules to Snake] Basketball. Two hoops, full court. Ten-second shot clock. Miss a shot, you get shot. Shot clock buzzer goes off before you shoot, you get shot. Two points for a basket, no three-point bullshit. All you gotta do is make ten points. That's it... By the way, nobody's ever walked off that court alive. Nobody.

Dialogue

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The United States is a non-smoking nation. No smoking, no drinking, no drugs, no women, unless, of course, you're married. No guns, no foul language, no red meat.
 
He's not even here, he's a hologram!
 
Genetically engineered. One-hundred percent pure death.
 
Shut down the Third World; they lose, you win. Shut down America; you lose, they win. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
 
You push that button, everything we've accomplished for the past 500 years will be finished. Our technology, our way of life, our entire history. We'll have to start all over again. For God's sakes, don't do it, Snake!
 
He did it! He shut down the Earth!
[in the detention/deportation center]
POTUS: Would you explain to this foot soldier why he's going to do what we tell him to do?
Snake: What's he talking about?
Malloy: The Plutoxin Seven virus.
Brazen: Genetically engineered. One-hundred percent pure death.
Malloy: It starts with a slight headache, then turns into a fever that gets worse. After a short time, you crash. You bleed out like a stuck pig. Not a pretty sight.
Snake: I get it. You figure that you inject that shit into me, and under the threat of death, I'll do whatever you say... just like in New York.
Malloy: You got it... Snake!
Snake: One question: which one of you assholes gets to die trying to stick me?
Malloy: You don't understand. It's already in you.
[Snake looks down at his hand, where Brazen scratched him earlier]
Brazen: Catches on quick, doesn't he?
Snake: Let's say I come back and I have your black box. Who'll give me the antidote to the virus?
Malloy: A medical team will be standing by.
Snake: Neither one of you will be there?
Malloy: No.
Snake: Good! [fires at Brazen and Malloy, with no effect]
Malloy: Ha! Figured you might try that, hotshot. That's why the first clip is loaded with blanks. Bye-bye, Snake. Good luck!
[After the President receives the Sword of Damocles command remote from Malloy and condemns his daughter Utopia to execution]
Malloy: She didn't know that she had that remote unit in her pocket, now, did she? I was wondering what kind of lame switch you'd try to pull this time, Plissken. You know, you're becoming very predictable.
Snake: Yeah I guess so. You got a smoke?
Malloy: The United States is a non-smoking nation. No smoking, no drinking, no drugs, no women, unless, of course, you're married. No guns, no foul language, no red meat.
Snake: "Land of the free..."
[The President orders the execution of Snake for him switching the Sword of Damocles command remote. Soldiers fire at him, with no effect. Malloy takes a gun and walks to Snake, swinging it at him. The gun passes right through.]
Brazen: He's not even here, he's a hologram!
Snake: Catches on quick, doesn't she?
[As Brazen alerts the President that military forces from Cuba and Mexico are less than two minutes away from attacking Florida]
President: What's it to be, Plissken? Us or them?
Snake: Shut down the Third World; they lose, you win. Shut down America; you lose, they win. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
President: So what are you going to do?
Snake: Disappear. [Types "666" on the remote]
Brazen: [looks at Sword of Damocles system display] He's entered the world code...no target code. [to the President] Sir, that'll shut down the entire planet.
Snake: I told you, you'd better hope I didn't make it back.
Malloy: You push that button, everything we've accomplished for the past 500 years will be finished. Our technology, our way of life, our entire history. We'll have to start all over again. [takes one step closer and pleads] For God's sakes, don't do it, Snake!
Snake: The name's Plissken. [pushes the button; the Sword of Damocles EMP satellites fire off, disabling all electrical systems - including Utopia's electric chair just before she is to be executed]
Utopia: [as the light fades out] He did it! He shut down the Earth!
[holographic image of Snake winks out; the real Snake tosses the holo-cam aside. He finds a cigarette and lights it, smiles, and blows out the match as he looks to the camera]
Snake: Welcome to the human race.

Taglines

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  • Snake is Back.

About Escape from L.A.

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“Escape From L.A.” took some courage for Carpenter, Russell and Hill to make; they had to hope that moviegoers would accept a special effects picture with a satiric sense of humor. Yes, there are laughs in “Independence Day,” but they're fairly obvious and don't sting. “Escape From L.A.” has fun with the whole concept of pictures like itself. It goes deliberately and cheerfully over the top, anchored by Russell's monosyllabic performance, which makes Clint Eastwood sound like Gabby Hayes. ~ Roger Ebert
  • Escape from L.A. is better than the first movie. Ten times better. It’s got more to it. It’s more mature. It’s got a lot more to it. I think some people didn’t like it because they felt it was a remake, not a sequel... I suppose it’s the old question of whether you like Rio Bravo or El Dorado better? They’re essentially the same movie. They both had their strengths and weaknesses.
  • So, I agree, the effects aren't always charming and sometimes a little, bizarrely awful. The other thing I would level at Escape from L.A. is that it doesn't really justify its 1996 $50 million budget. The aforementioned Jurassic Park had a budget of only $65 million and look what that accomplished. However, a little in its defense, every single shot in Escape from L.A. has some form of effect, whacked out costume, matte painting, set dressing etc. It's a bonkers, punk, grindhouse, fucked up, grungy, comic book, B-Movie writ large.
  • Most of what John Carpenter made was gloriously weird, dark, B-movies, genre movies or movies that felt like comic-books. Escape From L.A. really isn't all that different in that regard. Maybe it's lighter, maybe it's a bit sillier, maybe it's more far fetched but if these are the reasons you dislike it, I would suggest you majorly lighten up. Don't you all love Big Trouble in Little China?
  • John Carpenter's “Escape From L.A.” is a go-for-broke action extravaganza that satirizes the genre at the same time it's exploiting it. It's a dark vision of a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles—leveled by a massive earthquake, cut off from the mainland by a flooded San Fernando Valley, and converted into a prison camp for the nation's undesirables.
  • Against this backdrop Carpenter launches a visual effects fantasy that reaches heights so absurd that there's a giddy delight in the outrage. He generates heedlessness and joy in scenes such as the one where the hero surfs on a tsunami wave down Wilshire Boulevard and leaps onto the back of a speeding convertible. It's as if he gave himself license to dream up anything—to play without a net. This is the kind of movie “Independence Day” could have been if it hadn't played it safe.
  • Movies like this depend on w:visual effects, costumes and set design to create their worlds out of scratch, and “Escape From L.A.” is wall-to-wall with the landmarks of a post-earthquake L.A. We see the Chinese theater, the Hollywood Bowl and a beached ocean liner, and the showdown takes place in an amusement park intended, I think, to suggest Disneyland's Main Street USA. Snake finds his way through the deadly wilderness with a series of guides, including Pipeline (Peter Fonda), a has-been surfer; Taslima (Valeria Golino), a beautiful but doomed street person; Map-to-the-Stars Eddie (Steve Buscemi), who is the “guy to see” about anything, and the exotic Hershe (Pam Grier), a transsexual who once befriended Snake back in Cleveland, where he/she was known as Carjack.
  • At the end, when Snake has only 20 minutes to find Cuervo Jones, grab the black box and seize the daughter, Hershe suggests they get to Pasadena in a hurry by using hang-gliders. Whose heart is so stony it can resist the sight of Kurt Russell and Pam Grier swooping down from the sky, automatic weapons blazing, in an attack on Disneyland? Who, for that matter, can resist some of the other stops along the way, including Snake's encounter with a colony of “surgical failures,” who have had one plastic surgery too many, and can survive only by obtaining a steady supply of fresh body parts? Or by the sight of San Fernando Valley used-car signs peeking above the waves? Or by a chase scene which involves motorcycles, cars, trucks, horses, machine-guns and boleros? “Escape From L.A.” took some courage for Carpenter, Russell and Hill to make; they had to hope that moviegoers would accept a visual effects picture with a satiric sense of humor. Yes, there are laughs in “Independence Day,” but they're fairly obvious and don't sting. “Escape From L.A.” has fun with the whole concept of pictures like itself. It goes deliberately and cheerfully over the top, anchored by Russell's monosyllabic performance, which makes Clint Eastwood sound like Gabby Hayes.
  • Futuristic Los Angeles fantasies have uneven histories at the box office; neither “Blade Runner” nor “Strange Days” did all that well in their initial theatrical releases. But “Escape From L.A.” has such manic energy, such a weird, cockeyed vision, that it may work on some moviegoers as satire and on others as the real thing. That could lead to some interesting audience reactions.
  • The film exults in its imagination of the greater Los Angeles area as a ruined metropolis, with the Santa Monica Freeway well underwater and the Universal Studios theme park beset by real sharks instead of the Spielberg variety. In the action climax, Disneyland—stripped of its familiar branding following a corporate bankruptcy—is invaded from the skies as Plissken drops in, gun blazing. (It's not the movie of a man who's entirely happy with the machinations of Hollywood studios.) Carpenter later said he wanted the scene to be reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, which figures. With its aggressively whimsical dream logic, the only way this movie really makes sense is if Snake wakes up in Kansas in the final reel.
  • The worst of it is that Escape from L.A. was released at a time when computer graphics were still in their relative infancy, and its CGI is frankly cartoonish, while the composites that make up that surfboard ride down Wilshire Boulevard are...unconvincing. Some of the miniatures work holds up pretty well, but the film will forever be dated by the phoniness of its most ambitious effects, including shots held together by the digital equivalent of chewing gum and bailing wire. In a pinch, you could posit the crudely-layered VFX work as an elegant fit with the goofy, comic-book style of the action, but I think that's a reach.
  • And there's another way the movie's dated. I'm definitely in favor of roles for Pam Grier, and Carpenter gives her a small but showy one in Escape from L.A.. She plays Hershe—it's pronounced like "Hershey," thus it's an insistent play on race as well as gender. See, Hershe is a transwoman with hairy 'pits and an uncharacteristically deep voice who used to be a buddy of Snake's known as Carjack Malone. When Snake finds her, he gets in close, runs his hand up her thigh to her crotch and declares, "The more things change, the more they stay the same," before intimidating "Carjack" with the gun he found there. When she insists, "I'm no longer Carjack Malone," he hisses in response, "I don't give a fuck what you are." Yes, Plissken has story reasons for threatening Hershe. But, absent that greater context, the film plays here exactly as though Snake is threatening a hate crime.
  • Context is everything, and I don't imagine that either Carpenter or Russell harbors much ill will towards transsexuals. I might even argue that Carpenter's decision to cast a great actress like Pam Grier in a transgender role is evidence of his egalitarianism. Still, with the presence-or-not of a dick between her legs dropped as one in a long series of jokes about crazy Angelenos, the aggression rankles. Eighteen years have passed since the film's release, and I'm guessing neither Carpenter nor Russell would be comfortable including the scene as written if the film were released today. Like the outmoded VFX work, it's a flourish that makes Escape from L.A. uglier than it was intended to be.
  • Once again, Snake has to enter a sprawling urban prison zone and, with a deadly virus implanted in his blood, carry out a suicide mission. I have no idea why Russell is doing a brazen Clint Eastwood impersonation, but I do know that no one who looks this good need croak out his lines in this steely a whisper. Carpenter’s L.A. suggests a Bosnian refugee camp outfitted by Frederick’s of Hollywood. Every so often, we get to feast our eyes upon a trashed landmark — cheesy B-movie mock-ups of the Capitol Records tower and the Beverly Hills Hotel lying in ruins. Carpenter never was the filmmaker his cult claimed him to be, but in Escape From L.A., he at least has the instinct to keep his hero moving, like some leather-biker Candide. Among Snake’s more amusing pit stops: a gladiatorial basketball game in the L.A. Coliseum and a cosmetics emporium run by the ”Surgeon General of Beverly Hills.”
  • Owen Gleiberman, (1996-08-23). "Escape From L.A." Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 2015-09-16.
  • Since the millennium, the capital of the country has been relocated to Lynchburg, Va., and the government has outlawed cursing, smoking, drinking and red meat. Los Angeles may be hellish, but at least, explains one exiled character, there you can still wear a fur coat.
    For good comic measure, the movie also throws in Pam Grier as a transsexual Los Angeles overlord, and Steve Buscemi as the ultimate, fast-talking, double-dealing, sleazy Hollywood agent, a slimeball with the unfortunate name of Map to the Stars Eddie.
  • Question: Do you remember what your creative approach was to it?
Coleman Luck: Sure. I looked at it and said: here’s LA. I’ve been living in LA for a number of years and the first thing that occurred to me was: you know, LA in the future that we’re talking about here, the earthquake has happened—the giant earthquake has separated the city from the rest of the country—and LA is now an asylum for the criminally insane. With millions of people living in it and all the things that are in LA that we love; from the traffic jams to everything under the sun. Just everything. I went up with a sendoff on all of it. And of course Snake Plissken is gonna get sent into this place. And experience all the stuff that’s going on. I turned Disneyland into Ratland and I mean, it was dark; let me tell you, it was dark!
  • It's been 15 years since Carpenter's futuristic cowboy-noir archetype Snake Plissken (Russell) unpenned the President from the New York City Maximum Security Prison, but then as Snake himself liked to note, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Of course, there have been a few minor revisions to the United States since then: The “Big One” finally hit California, decimating Los Angeles and leaving the city and its environs less than landlocked, Donald Pleasance's position as President has been filled by the bible-thumping histrionics of an apparently de-lobed Cliff Robertson, and the resultant political climate has left the country a theocratic police state. Citizens convicted of moral crimes (pre-marital sex, smoking, eating red meat, voting Democratic, etc.) are packed off to the island of Los Angeles where they are left to fend for themselves against the roving gangs and genuine psychotics that litter the island like so much post-quake detritus.
  • Dark, percussive and perversely fun, "Escape From L.A." puts Kurt Russell as hard-nosed outlaw hero Snake Plissken right where he belongs—in the ruins of Hollywood, where bravado on a Harley or a surfboard can be a tool for survival.
  • In the movie's opening scenes, Los Angeles cracks up big time. It becomes an island of rubble in the middle of a huge bay with Malibu at one end and Orange County at the other. The San Fernando Valley is a sea filled with sharks and the ruins of old freeways and collapsed apartment complexes. Compared with the spare-looking "Escape From New York," this "Escape" looks like a Brueghel painting—dense, meaty, strangely beautiful. The filmmakers credit the 1994 Northridge quake as an inspiration.
  • Underneath the film's "hey dude" attitude, "Escape From L.A." is surprisingly effective in picturing a former nirvana clenched in the twisted rubble of its own excess. The City of Angels has become the perfect prison for kooks, yet the film also shows us a somehow familiar America of kooks in high places, preening and self-righteous, ruthless as rats.
  • When it came to making “Escape from LA,” Carpenter had a budget of around $50 million to work with. But while he and Russell had more time and money, Carpenter said he had the hardest time writing the screenplay for it because he felt that everything he was writing was “bullshit.” What got him to revisit Snake Plissken was that Russell was so keen on playing the character again, and they solved their script problem by moving the action to Los Angeles which was in a constant state of denial with all the earthquakes and natural disasters occurring there. They simply took the same scenario of the original movie and updated it to reflect the current state of the city while filming.
  • “Escape From New York” may have had only one real New York shot in the entire movie, but all of “Escape from LA” was filmed in Los Angeles. The sequel was shot over a period of one hundred and three nights, and Carpenter said he found filming at night to be very “soul draining” as it changes the way you see things and the darkness infects you in a very unhealthy way.
  • With much humor and high adventure, "John Carpenter's Escape From L.A." brilliantly imagines a Dante-esque vision of the City of Angels 17 years from now as a hell on Earth, all but destroyed—and made an island—by a 9.6 earthquake in 1998.
    Amid endless vistas of ruins—think Berlin at the end of World War II—the Chinese Theater, the Capitol Records building, a wing of the Beverly Hills Hotel and other damaged landmarks still stand to let us know where we are. Inspired, meticulously detailed production design in turn serves as a background for a provocative high-octane action thriller that reunites Carpenter with producer Debra Hill and Kurt Russell, who jointly wrote this spectacular, superior sequel to their rousing 1981 "Escape From New York," which, by the way, was set in 1997.
  • At the top of his game, Carpenter and his cohorts boldly tap into the twin strains of paranoia gripping the present-day American society, suggesting that we face one or the other of two of our worst nightmares coming true. They suggest that liberals fear a fascistic Moral Majority-style takeover—it's not for nothing that Robertson's president has moved the government to Lynchburg, Va.--whereas conservatives fear a Latino invasion from the South of the Border. Snake, therefore, becomes the man in the middle with whom most of us identify.
  • A cartoonish, cheesy and surprisingly campy apocalyptic actioner, “John Carpenter’s Escape From L.A.” is spiked with a number of funny and anarchic ideas, but doesn’t begin to pull them together into a coherent whole. Designed principally to return Kurt Russell’s violence-prone Snake character to the screen after a 15-year layoff and to gain maximum mileage out of the public’s delight in seeing the worst possible fate visited upon SoCal, this serving of sloppy seconds will score its biggest hit with teenage boys. Paramount should look to make a quick getaway with as much B.O. booty as possible from potent openings, as staying power looks meager.
  • It has been 16 years since Snake's exploits in New York City. He's once again arrested, this time for a series of moral crimes, and sentenced to exile on the prison island. However, he's recruited, once again against his will, to retrieve the remote. In exchange, his criminal record will be expunged and he can start anew.
    As his next adventure progresses, Snake meets a group of individuals, which include Heshe Las Palmas, a transsexual gang leader played by Pam Grier, "Map to the Stars" Eddie, played by Steve Buscemi, and the seductive Taslima, played by Valeria Golino. Taslima has been sent to L.A. for the simple fact that she is Muslim. She later confides in Snake that despite the anarchistic nature of her new surroundings, she feels it's the only place one could be absolutely free, since the outside world has in one way or another created a prison of its own.
    Similar to the original film, these various characters aid Plissken in navigating his way through the former tinsel town, foiling the villain's plot and returning to the mainland. It is there, when the time comes for Snake to hand over the device, that he realizes the true power of the weapon he has helped to secure, which guarantees victory for whoever possesses it. Realizing this, Snakes comes to the conclusion that no one should wield that much power and hits the reset button, erasing the last several hundred years of technological advancements, sending us back to the Stone Age. Our iconic anti-hero then proceeds to break the fourth wall by giving the audience one final badass look; leaving us to venture into a world that may be even more dangerous than the one we just left behind. "Welcome to the human race," he states.
  • And now, we're in 2013, the year in which John Carpenter set his 1996 sci-fi thriller Escape From L.A. Though a box-office dud of mixed critical reputation, Escape From New York's pulpy sequel offers a fun viewing experience today—in part, unsurprisingly, because our world little resembles the one the film imagined.
    Of course, it's a very good thing it doesn't. In the film's prologue, a stern, robotic-sounding female narrator offers a disturbing vision of America gone wrong. After a deadly earthquake in the year 2000, Los Angeles separated from mainland North America, so our government uses the newly formed island for prisoners, atheists, and other undesirables. Present-day California's quite-terrible prison problems pale in comparison.
  • The surprisingly character-driven script, too, wouldn't fly today. Rather than focus on elaborate set pieces and action sequences, Carpenter, Hill, and Russell give their actors ample time to talk and double-cross each other. Sometimes Snake is the trickster—in one memorable moment, he kills armed men by appealing to their sense of fair play, which he does not reciprocate—but most of the time everyone around Snake betrays him. Steve Buscemi turns up as "Map of the Stars" Eddie, and at first he's eager to help. But as the movie continues, Eddie reveals himself as a lackey for Cuervo Jones (Georges Corraface), a Peruvian revolutionary and the movie's de-facto villain. With the exception of Peter Fonda's whacked-out hippie, the characters of Escape From L.A. are unfailingly selfish and mean. Plissken gets some help from Hershe (Pam Grier), a transgender crime lord, but only after he lies to her about a government payoff.
    The most satisfying payoff of seeing Escape From L.A. today is in realizing that 1996 imagined 2013 so as to fantasize about regressing. At one point in the film, someone remarks Plissken looks "so 20th century." That's not a phrase that anyone uses today, but it speaks to a deeper truth: This is a pro-nostalgia antihero, disgusted by the world around him, only able to be happy—insofar as he can be happy—when he's on a surfboard. At the end of the movie, Plissken uses the black box to effectively turn off the world's light switch. The screen cuts to black and Russell offers the last line: "Welcome to the human race." Transpose that turn of events onto 2013 as it actually exists, and it becomes more profound than it was in theaters. Nothing would make Snake Plissken angrier than friends at a restaurant ignoring one another because they're transfixed by their smart phones.

Cast

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