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There are parallels aplenty. But, with this film, the fear is gone. The tension is gone. The mystery is gone. And it's replaced by something that is both campy and oddly sincere, but has no business being in a sequel to Escape from New York.
Usually, conservatives are the cynical ones, but Carpenter's liberalism is quite jaded this time around and in a movie about heroes and villains, that's especially obvious. Now, in our post-modern age, we're above having good/bad guys and genuine thrills in an action film. We're too sophisticated for this. Now everything is done with this tongue-in-cheek ridiculousness that winks at the audience. All straightforwardness or innocence is gone. It's like we're right back where we were in the Seventies prior to the release of Star Wars. All of the thrills in Escape from L.A. are so preposterous that it's impossible to imagine the filmmakers taking them seriously. Hang-glider raids on Disneyland. Plissken beating basketball records or surfing into the back of a convertible with Peter Fonda. Conceptually cute, but ultimately cynical, because they say, "Look, we know you really can't take true heroism seriously, because it doesn't exist in our Pulp Fiction-ised, Oliver Stoned world, so we'll all be in on the joke. Okay?".
The movie has no sense of wit or perspective. As with Robocop, it has this very heavy-handed left wing sense of humour that highlights the painfully obvious and expects us to believe that a religious loony would get elected President. It's as outrageous as a right wing comedy seriously showing a left-wing president kissing a bust of Stalin before going to bed. Even if Hollywood made that type of movie (which it wouldn't), it would be a humourless moment, totally lacking in wit or taste. The more truth a gag has, the funnier it will be, while the jokes in Escape from L.A. are so grossly exaggerated (especially the political ones) as to leave the realm of humour completely. Carpenter, as in They Live (which I liked), allows his liberal paranoia to masquerade as humour and get the better of the movie. The sentiment is one we can sympathise with, but the aim is way off.
The shift for Carpenter and our post-modern culture is even more evident if you watch Escape from New York. To repeat, Carpenter stole from it everything except the good parts. In the first film, the crisis is caused by crazy, left wing terrorists - not unbelievable. They are scary while the president is, at worst, a selfish jerk (at the very, very end) rather than a Bible-beating wacko. The New York people are shown as subhuman, suffering a crime rate that has risen 400%. The walling off of New York is rational. It is crime, not the government, which has gotten out of hand. In LA, it is the polar opposite. We have crazy right-wingers in office who seal off LA as a prison for people who have abortions, eat red meat, smoke, and wear fur. But those last three are liberal taboos! Carpenter can't even be consistent and you can't have it both ways.
In Escape from New York, the situation is taken pretty seriously and it works as a movie. In fact, it's one of the best B+ grade movies ever made. Escape from L.A. copies the plot points, but none of the urgency or scariness. Now criminals are just misunderstood good guys who were forced to be bad or are seen as bad by an evil Right Wing presidency. How naive and how boring. In its favour, the film does boast one of the great kitsch casts of all time: Kurt Russell; Michelle (Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Ensign Ro") Forbes; Stacy Keach; Cliff Robertson; Peter Fonda; Steve Buscemi; Bruce Campbell; and Pam (Sheba Baby) Grier. You'd think that a cast like that would be worth the rental. Guess again.
Patrick McCray.
VNDP20D@prodigy.com
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