IS THE SNAKE PLISSKEN FROM "ESCAPE FROM L.A." MORE CRUEL THAN THE SNAKE PLISSKEN FROM "ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK"?

By

Mohammad A. Khan

When I saw Escape From L.A., almost alone, in a darkened theater for the first time, one of the things that struck me was how monumentally cruel Snake Plissken had become.

Now, granted the character is renowned for his toughness to the world (as per Kurt Russell from the electronic presskit for EFLA), but what I saw in EFLA was pretty mind-boggling.

I want to present some arguments as to why the EFLA Snake Plissken is more evil as compared to the Snake in EFNY. Now, I'm not slamming the character, I'm just making an observation. He's been through a lot in the 15 years between the two films so he deserves to treat people the way he does, I'm just saying that it was a shock to the system when I saw it. And anyone who doesn't agree with me ought to read my arguments first.

It's Miller Time baby…

Right after, and I mean, RIGHT after Snake's first encounter with a gambling skinhead-knife thrower, Snake is shown ascending a staircase and looking around. If you stare hard enough as he reaches the top of the stairs and begins walking, he briefly collides with a punk girl who has her butt-cheeks exposed or something. It's not much, but jeez how rude! Snake doesn't give the punk a second thought and you can see that the punk is not exactly willing to take Plissken to task for the unkind brush-off so to speak.

Was Snake ever so blatantly rude in EFNY? I mean, physically of course, not by way of his mouth, which was always spewing some hilarious insight into his view of the world.

Hey one-eye!

After pissing off the skin head-knife thrower the first time he meets him, Snake runs into the punk once again after receiving directions on how to locate Cuervo Jones. As Snake stalks away in the direction a hooker points out to him, the skin-head (marvelously played by Revenge of the Nerds star Robert Carradine and a fact unknown to me for some time!) confronts him.

The skin-head demands that Plissken face him. Plissken however has his own plans and just ignores him. This enrages the skin-head and to no end and so he yanks out the BIGGEST FRIGGIN' HUNTING KNIFE YOU'VE EVER SEEN!! No, I'm kidding, but it is a big knife ;)

Anyway, the skin-head pulls out his knife and is about to embed it into Plissken's back when Snake, with an almost precognitive sense of danger, turns around, and squeezes off a blast from his Warbird machine gun. The poor skin head is rocked back by the impact, never to rise again.

I don't recall Snake ever dispatching a villan in EFNY so matter-of-factly. Don't get me wrong though, I'd rather see the hilt of a knife buried six inches deep in the back of a skin-head rather than Snake.

"OK! OK!"

During Snake's first attempt at killing Cuervo Jones, he gets close enough to the villan by leaping across a parade of vehicles. At one point, just when lands on the back of a pickup and knocks out two bad guys with the business end of a shotgun, he spins around and unceremoniously fires a shotgun blast into the windshield of the truck right behind him. The glass shatters and a red blotch appears on the smashed glass.

I know Snake is the good guy in the film, and that if he had not killed the driver in the other truck then it would have been bad for him, but I still thought it was a little excessive and underhanded. Most action films would have let the villan tumble away or barely escape with his life. Not in this case though, Snake was not necessarily defending his life against the driver of the truck either, so was the driver's death necessary?

Perhaps this violence is representative of some of the mindless mayhem in Assault on Precinct 13?

"Cut her down…"

This was quite possibly my biggest gripe in the entire film. When Plissken is able to free himself from the clutches of The Surgeon General of Beverly Hills by zapping him with a mouth dart filled with Euralide, he orders that Taslima also be set free, once she convinces him ofcourse.

But how did we get to this point? Not because Snake initiated anything, but that Taslima is responsible for!

I mean, Snake is all but ready to bolt through the doors until Taslima cries foul and tells him that he should help her too, because without her, he'll never make it out of Beverly Hills alive. The mere fact that Plissken would've abandoned her like that was shocking. He only cut her down because he needed her, his modus operandi being that it is vital only to make it the next sixty seconds. Taslima's counter part in the Escape universe would be the Girl in the Chock Full O Nuts, (somebody Snake was dispassionate to) but tried to help without having being asked to.

Anyway, onto part b.

When Taslima jumps down from the stretcher she is tied to, you get a nice shot of Snake relishing a final blow on an already half-unconscious Surgeon General. Hard enough for the mad doctors eyes to flutter wide for a second. I thought that this was a pretty low blow, even for Snake. I mean, the Surgeon General was just being a token bad guy. Snake had won, but he just had to get that extra lick in, to let that crazy doctor know how mean a real sonofabitch could really be.

At least in EFNY Snake was didn't resort to cheap shots when he was being ambushed by the Crazies. I mean, he just pointed his gun and squeezed the trigger.

My father sent you to kill me, didn't he?

When Utopia follows Snake down into the sewers to escape the madness that is L.A., we see a most unique side of Snake.

Plissken has been ordered to kill the traitor, and in an inspired move, quite unlike any other scene in the "Escape" films we finally get to glimpse some of the ruthlessness behind the legend of Snake Plissken.

What I mean to say is that the glazed look he gets in his eye as he raises his rifle is probably the same look he had as a soldier fighting in Leningrad and Siberia during WWIII. It's the closest we ever come to seeing Snake at his most evil, most dangerous. We never see this side of Plissken in EFNY, when he was at his most raw, but we do in EFLA, which I think is odd. Another reason, why EFLA's Plissken is a more disenchanted version of the character than the EFNY version.

And that's it. I hope you enjoyed my probing analysis of the GREAT character of Snake Plissken. He may be evil, but he is great and a one-of-a-kind and ya gotta love him if you know what's good for ya.