Before 1981 and Escape from New York, John Carpenter had already scored huge hits and all time classics with Dark Star, Assault on Prescient 13 and Halloween. Why on earth he didn't opt for higher budgets is anyone's guess, because Escape from New York squanders a brilliant premise on shortages of budget, imagination and action. Kurt Russell impersonates Clint Eastwood as Snake Plissken: a convicted criminal who is sent into New York in 1997, which is now America's one and only maximum security prison, to rescue the President (Pleasence) whose plane has crashed. The film plays like a futuristic western, with Lee Van Cleef overseeing the operation from the control room, making the film's roots in Sergio Leone apparent. To be fair to Carpenter, he manages a lot on the $6 million budget: a great, dark look to the film, a panoramic cityscape, good special effects, impressive sets, a couple of effective action sequences, a script laced with black humour as well a great main theme. As a whole these elements make the film reasonably enjoyable. However it simply isn't enough. The film never fulfils its ingenious premise by not making use of Snake's time limit to complete the mission until the very end and as a result it spends a long time just not going anywhere. There's not enough action and the bad guys are a bunch of lacklustre convicts, lead by Isaac Hayes. Carpenter fans may lap it up as B-movie hokum, but for the rest of us, this should have been a serious slice of action cinema. 5/10
Review of Escape from New York
