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Yet, the $25.4 million final tally of Escape from LA is at the high end of most of his film’s final figures. Excepting Halloween, Starman is Carpenter’s highest grosser, with the two Escape films just behind, and Christine, The Fog, and Vampires not far after them. Most of his features are cult hits in the making/waiting. His reputation was secured nearly 35 years ago, and he has been free, with mostly smallish budgets, to make the films he wants.

Paramount went out on a bit of a limb (although perhaps the studio already had its worries accounted for with Titanic still in production) but my guess is that they were counting on Kurt Russell to bring in more of an audience than was the case. The early to mid 1990s were his commercial high water mark with Tango and Cash, Backdraft, Unlawful Entry, Tombstone, Stargate, Executive Decision, and Breakdown each grossing between $50 and $75 million. In fact, during those seven years, the only films that didn’t reach that range were Escape from LA and...Captain Ron. (Oddly enough, in his impressive five-decade career, Russell has starred in exactly one (1!) film to crack the $100 million plateau. Any guesses? See the end of the column for the answer).

I saw Escape from LA in the theater, but I had never seen Escape from New York until last month. (My favorite films by the director are The Thing, They Live, and In the Mouth of Madness, all variations on the theme that you can’t really trust your perception of your friends or the world around you, and all rendered with varying strains of dark, ironic humor.) I hadn’t been deferring the film such much as avoiding it. Snake Plissken never seemed all that much of an interesting character in his second film and I found it hard to believe there was a lot to be gained from seeing him at the center of the same kind of predicament.

I recall Russell giving an interview once where he likened Jack Burton, his character in Big Trouble in Little China, to a parody of the macho, in control action heroes such as Plissken. The trouble I have with that statement is that Plissken comes off as a parody to begin with. With that ridiculous growl, the “mysterious” eye patch, and hair that yearns to be defined as post-apocalyptic mullet, he never screams to be taken seriously.

Escape from New York struck me as a fairly benign action film for a story in which the whole of NYC has been turned into a maximum-security prison. Plissken seems hopelessly mismatched for almost the entire time — attempting to rescue the President of the United States after his plane makes an emergency landing in said prison — and nothing much ever seems at stake, until a surprisingly moody and downbeat final 10 minutes in which most of the supporting cast is killed and our anti-hero achieves a well-played fuck you to the powers that be, kind of the 1980s riff on Harry Callahan tossing his badge into the trash at the end of Dirty Harry. The mission was accomplished, but in the existential scheme of things, did it really mean anything?

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