“In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent. The once great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison for the entire country. A fifty-foot containment wall is erected along the New Jersey shoreline, across the Harlem River, and down along the Brooklyn shoreline. It completely surrounds Manhattan Island. All bridges and waterways are mined.
The United States Police Force, like an army, is encamped around the island. There are no guards inside the prison, only prisoners and the worlds they have made. The rules are simple: once you go in, you don’t come out.”
Forty years ago in the summer of 1981, legendary director John Carpenter was in what many consider to be the height of his career. He had just come off the success of Halloween (1978) and The Fog (1980), and now he was ready for his next big project; a sci-fi action thriller set in the “distant future” of a dystopian world of 1997 America with Escape From New York (1981).
This week, Escape From New York celebrated its 40th Anniversary. It seemed like the perfect time to take a look back at this painfully unique film, a film that did everything it could to stand out from the crowd and define its own flavor. Escape From New York gives us a 1980s style used-future like only John Carpenter could provide that feels like a fever dream.
The world presented in the film is the perfect example of how things would be if the apocalypse happened, but the world hadn’t quite ended. Things have gone to hell in a handbasket and no one seems particularly worried about stopping them. The city of New York (and more specifically, the island of Manhattan) has been walled off from the world as a free-range prison, with the government viewing it largely as no-man’s-land aside from protecting the borders so prisoners do not escape. Things are bleak, to say the least.
The film’s plot itself is a relatively simple one- a plane transporting the President of the United States (Donald Pleasence) gets hijacked by terrorists and goes down while flying over the prison island of New York City. The President was in the process of transporting sensitive material to a peace summit and only has a limited timeline to get them there.
Enter Snake Plisskin (Kurt Russell)! A disgraced war hero who is completely done and over with any and all bullshit. Snake himself says it best towards the end of the film, “I’m too tired.” Plisskin is definitively a badass who kicks ass and takes names later. He finds himself pulled out of his own prison stay to rescue the President, as he is considered the best man for the job; he’s skilled, expendable, and highly motivated since the military just stuck a time-release explosive in his neck! Leaving him with little choice in the matter, Snake now has a mere 22 hours to get dropped into New York, find the President, and get back out.
This wouldn’t be so bad, except that New York is completely overrun with criminals that are ready to do just about anything to survive. Desolate and decrepit, New York is falling apart at the seams. The entire city is run by the self-appointed Duke Of New York (Issac Hayes), who rules with a short temper and an iron fist. The Duke Of New York has kidnapped the President and is now holding him for ransom in hopes of seeing himself and his fellow prisoners released with full amnesty.
As the movie is four decades old, I’m sure you can piece together most of the rest. Snake makes his way through the city while coming up against increasingly challenging obstacles. He faces off with The Duke Of New York a few times and even makes a few friends along the way like Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), Brain (Harry Dean Stanton), and Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau). At the end of the day, Snake manages to rescue the President just in time to save his own life from the explosives that had been implanted in his neck. Don’t worry, Plisskin still finds his ways to stick it to the man in the end too; keeping him consistent with his character.
Escape From New York is a brilliantly weird movie in so many ways. It has a unique style that manages to feel specific to itself while also feeling distinctly like a John Carpenter film. The world our characters are inhabiting feels like a living, breathing place. The abandoned New York City is split up into a wide variety of different environments, all with their own colorful cast of characters, from gangbangers, to cannibals, to those who are just trying to survive in the rotten wasteland of a city they’re locked up in.
As the film was made in the early 1980s, it predates a lot of modern action flicks and feels a bit tame by comparison to what most audiences are used to in an action movie. The combat sequences often feel clumsy and are filmed rather conservatively. Escape From New York was made with a budget of just $6-Million, which is meager even by 1981 standards, so much of the action had to be toned down to keep costs low.
As mentioned above, the cast is packed with several familiar faces that would become Carpenter regulars like Kurt Russell, Donald Pleasance, and the always welcome Tom Atkins. Russell walks a fine line between “bored as hell” and “absolute badass” the entire movie, and his level of interest fluctuates from scene to scene. This aloofness is what makes him such a standout character though, as most people wouldn’t handle themselves in such a blasé manner under the circumstances he is in. The man has just 22 hours to complete his mission or his head will explode, but he is just casually wandering the ruins of the city, and taking time to relax along the way.
It doesn’t hurt the movie that the rest of the main cast is padded out with Hollywood legends like Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Van Cleef, and Isaac Hayes. Carpenter is well known for stacking his casts with heavy hitters, and even at this earlier stage in his career, the man had an eye for talent that few could match. Unfortunately, even though the cast is full of big names, none of them are particularly given much to do. The script has a strong plot and setup but doesn’t do nearly enough with its cast of characters and has a severe lack of natural dialogue.
While the movie is absolutely insane in some great ways, it’s also worth noting that it somehow manages to plod along as slowly as humanly possible. The pacing is generally awful, with the movie relying heavily on many info dumps throughout to make sure audiences know what is actually going on. It doesn’t make the movie bad by any means, but it definitely detracts from its rewatchability. In the long run, while it may take some time to get the ball rolling, once the story gets going, it stays pretty consistent for the last third of the movie.
In the four decades since Escape From New York was released, both the film and its hero, Snake Plisskin, have become an iconic part of popular culture. Whether you love it or hate it, there is no denying that there is something truly special about a movie with lasting power like that. Director John Carpenter has produced a seemingly endless count of classic films, but perhaps none of the others have quite the unique flavor that he brought to the table for Escape From New York. That’s why he will always be “A-Number-One”.
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