Escape from L.A. (1996)

John Carpenter returns to the wasteland with a sequel that took fifteen years to arrive and roughly ninety minutes to squander the goodwill. The premise is a corker: a theocratic president for life has relocated the capital to Lynchburg, banned smoking, red meat, and premarital sex, and turned Los Angeles into a deportation island after an earthquake severed it from the mainland. Snake Plissken, infected with a virus and given ten hours to live, is sent in to retrieve a doomsday remote. The film plays as cockeyed satire, though its target is moral tyranny and petty authoritarianism, not the economic order. The closing lament about never-ending class warfare registers as a shrug, not a manifesto.

The ensemble is more varied than the genre demanded in 1996. Pam Grier, Georges Corraface, and a multiethnic supporting cast populate the island, though the film never pauses to congratulate itself for this. Hershe Las Palmas, a trans woman and former associate of Snake, commands soldiers and is treated as a capable leader without comment, a genuinely early instance of matter-of-fact mainstream casting. Utopia, the president's daughter, is assertive, but the movie remains a macho vehicle for a man in an eyepatch. The earthquake is pure plot mechanics. No environmental argument attends it. The satire aims at televangelist morality and at our devotion to gadgets, and it lands with a smirk instead of a sermon.

Where the film might have lectured, it slouches toward anarchy. The final image, Plissken lighting a cigarette and muttering about the human race after deactivating every machine on Earth, is a pointed anti-technology flourish delivered with a sneer. Carpenter's heart is in the mayhem, and the mayhem is cheap. The result is a curio: a sequel nobody requested, made with visible affection, carrying a few progressive textures that it declines to advertise. We file it accordingly.