Menekülés Los Angelesből

Olcsó, ostoba, B-kategóriás és zavaros - egyszóval rendezőileg maximálisan félresikerült. Úgy, mint John Carpenter legtöbb utóbbi alkotása. (2003.06.16)

A unique filmmaking phenomenon, the structure of which is interesting and entertaining, mainly with regards to its predecessor – on the one hand, it’s a typical sequel that expands the fictional world and makes several references about previous events, on the other, it looks like a remake that took the storyline of the first and added the genre needs of the period to it. Whereas Escape from New York is a thoroughbred representative of the 1980s B-movies that pays serious homage to several genre tropes, Escape from L.A. is eclectic, self-aware, over-the-top and surprisingly anarchist in a purely 1990s way. It’s packed with awful special effects and nonsense, but Carpenter kind of manages it, of course, and most of it is either great fun or very subversive twisted bollocks (the ending is great and convinced me to give it the fourth star). And Kurt Russell also delivers like never before. 70% (2020.03.25)

Released three years after Jurassic Park, this film was almost offending me technically, but the surfing scene made me understand that Carpenter doesn't take it seriously and is playing a bit of a joke on us. He’s the poet of B-movies, who, with the exception of The Thing , never knew how to do special effects and his fans never minded. The script is of course bollocks, but that's not the point, especially with Kurt being rough like sandpaper, and the ending is so absurdly anarchic that even Tyler Durden would blush with shame. (2016.03.27)

"Call me Snake." Lieutenant Snake has moved to the West Coast with his oil pipelines under his arms, and even though they see him as a rookie there, he demonstrates extraordinary sports skills in basketball, gliding, and surfing (the latter entering the annals of special effects perversion). In this Western post-apocalyptic world, where both the establishment and revolutionaries are the same scum, obscure characters enter the scene, and John Carpenter weaves a story around them that he probably came up with in seventh grade and has since recounted ten times cheaper and, by his own admission, ten times worse. When Plissken was equipped for his mission much like James Bond by Q, it was a question of what the matchbox would be used for. Unsurprisingly, he used it as a symbol of returning to his roots, i.e., the younger Stone Age. (2024.03.04)

Up until now, you could detect virtually no nineties influence in Carpenter's nineties flicks. In Escape from L.A., however, they finally landed with a giant blowjob. It's not just the obscene digital special effects that will surely make some scenes, in my opinion, the cornerstone of a future as-yet non-existent field of artistic study, but also the grey empty corridors of the military complexes, the baggy jumpsuits, the exploitation of urban subcultures, and the hedonistic genre self-consciousness. It's exactly like buying a kid a bunch of Legos from different sets and letting him assemble them as he sees fit, without any limits of reality. Stupid? Yep. Ugly-looking? Sure. Fun? Yeah, but honestly, it must have looked better on paper. Carpenter can't do big budget. (2020.10.23)