ESCAPE FROM L.A.
Tori Amos and White Zombie on the soundtrack.
How can this combination fail?
Man, I love John Carpenter. Well, maybe not as a person (I've never met the guy), but he's one of my favorite all-time filmmakers. In the Mouth of Madness blew me away like no other movie had since I saw Star Wars when I was something like 3 years old. But then came Village Of The Damned.
So, I went into EFLA with mixed expectations. I figured it would be bad because firstly, the trailers were pretty weak, and secondly, everything I had heard about it suggested that I'd heard it all before. But I also figured it would be good because come ON people, this is John Carpenter. If this guy can't pull this off, nobody can.
Well, I was right. Now, let's get into what I was right ABOUT...
Carpenter has been quoted many a time as saying he disdains sequels; he dislikes how filmmakers just make carbon copies of the originals and just pass them off as something new. That having been said, I suppose I can look upon EFLA in one of two ways: first, as Carpenter's attempt to illustrate this fact, to prove that one can actually make a carbon copy of the original and still have it make money, an idea I find rather insulting. What is this, a Batman & Robin-style middle finger at the audience? These are your own fans, Carp! Secondly, one might instead suspect that Carpenter actually believes this is how sequels MUST be made, and that "branching off" in another direction is somehow inappropriate. I don't know which one I'm afraid to believe more.
For you see, there's a lot of similarities between EFLA and its predecessor, Escape From New York. Here's some of them: THE PLOT IS EXACTLY THE SAME. The same female voice introducing us to the political situation in this new America and the fate of this major city. The same theme music. A running joke about Snake throughout the film (in EFNY it was "I thought you were dead." Here, it's "I thought you'd be taller"). A pointless break in the action to give Snake some sort of trial by which he can amuse bloodthirsty spectators. This island prison which used to be a city (du-uh). A time bomb implanted in Snake (in EFNY it was an exposive charge, here it's a virus). A "chief" villain who somehow managed to take charge of the city. A sympathetic young woman who meets an early, unexpected demise. A prison official who Snake only partly respects and gets along with. A cowardly, uncaring President. Snake getting injured and limping throughout the second half of the film. An old acquaintance of Snake who once betrayed him but now agrees to help him out.
Believe me, the list goes on, but you get the idea. A lot of this film is unforgivably unoriginal...stuff Carpenter lifts directly off of his own film (much like Andrew Davis just did in Chain Reaction, ripping off his own The Fugitive).
On the other hand, this film boasts some absolutely delightful originality. The "surfing" sequence, which looks dreadful on the small screen, looks much better in the theater and is actually one of the most inventive cinematic moments I've seen in years. Also clever (however implausible) is a hang glider attack sequence, and a cameo by Bruce Campbell as an almost unrecognizable Surgeon General of Beverly Hills who really has to be seen to be believed. This scene is actually one of those scenes where one cringes because it's just too close to reality. LOOK at these people!
The FX are spotty. The destruction of LA in the intro is shown mostly in two sequences: the collapse of a building (which looks cool but not particularly realistic) and the collapse of an overpass/freeway network (which looks great). The submarine sequence by which Snake enters LA is pretty weak; it looks like a bad "Seaquest" episode. The surfing scene is a little hokey, but enjoyably so; one cannot really expect a sequence as delightfully absurd as that to be depicted realistically.
The supporting characters are great; a lot of them are lifted from the original too (Brain has become Horace or whatever his/her name is, the Duke has become Cuervo Jones, etc), but they're one of the more interesting groups of eccentrics to grace the big screen lately. So, I suppose I'm trying to say that this film has a lot going for it. Russell is great; my friends and I have been running around saying "Your rules are really beginning to annoy me" for weeks now, and it's a shame that line didn't make the final cut (neither did Michelle Forbes' line, something along the lines of "We profiled 300,000 different psychopathic personalities. He hit the bottom of the curve.").
But for all it has going for it, Carpenter either doesn't really know how to make a sequel that can stand on its own, or he's actually pulling a fifty million dollar prank on the viewers, showing them just how often they get conned into watching the same movie again and again (and that's definitely something I wouldn't put past Carpenter - think about it. This is the same guy who put a seven-minute knock-down, drag-out fistfight in They Live for reasons which are still being debated.).
Anyway, would I recommend this film? Only if you're a big Carpenter fan or if you haven't seen EFNY recently (if you have, you're going to have a VERY strong sense of deja vu watching this). It's fun, and the ending is actually pretty unexpected ("He's not going to go through with it, is he?"), showing that Snake isn't just an anti-hero, he's more than a bit of a nut as well. I'm hoping this movie does well so the bigwigs in Hollywood will invest enough confidence in Carpenter next time to let him do his own thing. Otherwise, to my understanding, we'll see more projects like Body Bags from him in the future (which wouldn't be all bad; I'd rather watch his "Hair" than his Village of the Damned, for example).