Escape from L.A.

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Year:	1996
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	John Carpenter
Genre:	Dreadful rehash
Starring:	Kurt Russell, Steve Buscemi, Georges Corraface
Rating:	1/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116225/
Tagline:	Plan your escape this Summer
Favourite line:	None worth mentioning

Carpenter's worst movie by far, and I think I've seen the lot.
In a desperate re-hash of the simply excellent original, Snake is recruited once again, this time by the president of the United States to rescue his daughter from the clutches of Cuervo Jones, a Cuban terrorist and current leader of the unruly mob who have been deported to the prison island of L.A. isolated from the US mainland by a great earthquake.
In truth, I never expected great things, but the soulless bilge that is offered up here felt like something of an insult, knowing and appreciating most of The Great Man's other works, I took is as a personal affront that he would allow something this substandard to pass before his lens.
The characters are dreadful, especially Russell's Plisken who seems to have morphed into some hideous comic book anti-hero rather than the tough, grizzled anti-establishment persona of yesteryear - truly, you have to see the 'hilarious' basketball sequence to believe it - and, crucially, in Cuervo we have a villain who simply has no menace, no fire in his belly.
Ultimately though, the true killer for this movie is that you simply do not believe any of the things that are happening on screen are real. Every scene is a scene in a movie, and not a very good one at that, and not once are you drawn into the action.
Heh, we knew Jaws wasn't real, but by Christ did it scare us.
One to avoid my little cult of freaks