In a sentenceA city-sized prison, a president nobody likes, a hero who would rather be anywhere else; the synthesiser does the rest
It is 1997 and New York City is a walled maximum security prison. Breaking out is impossible; breaking in, as the authorities put it, is insane. Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) has reason to try anyway: the President of the United States (Donald Pleasence) is on the wrong side of the wall, among convicts who answer to the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes). Hauk’s one card is Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a convict who has just arrived to begin his own sentence and has no interest in anyone’s problems but his own. Snake goes in alone, at night, into streets of wrecked cars and fires in oil drums. Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) offers him a ride, and Harold ‘Brain’ Helman (Harry Dean Stanton) and Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau) are among the people he finds inside.
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John Carpenter walls off Manhattan, sends Kurt Russell in after the President and lets the dark and a synthesiser do the rest. The plot is thin and the middle hour drifts, but the mood holds and Russell’s whisper carries it.
In 1997, the United States has given up on Manhattan. The island is walled off and the people inside are left to run it as they please. Then the President of the United States ends up on the wrong side of the wall, and the only man the authorities can think to send after him is a convict on his way in. That is the whole of John Carpenter’s idea, written with Nick Castle, and he films it as if the idea alone were enough. It nearly is. Escape from New York is a lean, dark, sardonic thriller with a thin plot and more atmosphere than it knows what to do with, and we recommend it to anyone who likes their science fiction cheap and surly.
Dean Cundey shoots almost all of it at night, in a wide frame with a great deal of black in it. The streets are lit by fires in oil drums and the odd surviving headlamp, and the buildings behind them are shapes rather than places. Joe Alves’s production design fills the gutters with wrecked cars and stacked rubbish, and gives the convicts’ finery a look of looted grandeur, so you know what sort of people hold the place before anyone speaks. Carpenter lets the dark do most of the building.
The score, by Carpenter and Alan Howarth, is a few synthesiser notes over a bass line that walks rather than runs, and it does as much as the camera to make the place feel dangerous. The first time it drops out, when Snake is picking his way down an empty street and a grating lifts in the pavement, we flinched. It was nothing: a hand, a grate, a face. The film had earned the flinch with twenty minutes of quiet, and we were slightly embarrassed at how cheaply it got us.
Kurt Russell plays Snake Plissken with an eyepatch, a leather jacket and a voice barely above a whisper, and it is a joke he keeps straight for 99 minutes. People keep telling him things he does not want to hear; he never once raises his voice back. Lee Van Cleef, as Police Commissioner Bob Hauk, gives the briefing scenes a dry authority, and the two of them, old gunfighter and new, barely look at each other. Ernest Borgnine’s Cabbie is the film’s one warm body, driving around the ruins with show tunes on the cab’s tape player. Harry Dean Stanton’s Brain is a frightened man pretending to be a clever one, and Isaac Hayes’s Duke of New York says little and is more frightening for it. Donald Pleasence plays the President as a small, damp man nobody would cross the street for.
The plot is thin even by the standards of a chase film. Snake has a job and a reason to hurry, and the film forgets the hurry for long stretches, and so did we. The middle hour is mostly walking and talking in the dark, and Todd Ramsay’s editing cannot make a scene move when it has nowhere to go. The action, when it comes, is scrappy; a fight in a makeshift ring is staged flatly and shot too close. Adrienne Barbeau’s Maggie is written as scenery, and Season Hubley’s part is credited as Girl in Chock Full O’Nuts, which is about the measure of it. Stephen Loomis’s costumes do more for these people than the script does: you know what everyone is from what they wear, which is just as well.
Set against Carpenter’s own work, it sits below Halloween and The Thing, which are tighter, and alongside Assault on Precinct 13, which it resembles: a few people, a hostile place, a long night. What it has that they do not is a sense of humour about its hero. Most critics put it near the top of his films. We would put it a rung lower, because the pictures and the music promise a film the script never quite gets round to writing.
Watch it late, with the lights off and the sound up, and do not expect much to happen. The point is the walk. Russell’s whisper, Cundey’s black frames and that bass line will get you to the end, and the end, which we will not describe, is better than the hour before it.
Most critics like Escape from New York, and the lean is clearly positive: eight of eleven reviews are favourable and none is hostile. The praise clusters around Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken, whom several critics call the film’s focal point, and around the ruined New York itself: the production design, the night photography and the synth score come up again and again. Later reviewers find its vision of a broken police state has aged into something close to prophecy, and treat the politics as the main interest.
The reservations are about execution, not the idea. Radio Times and Variety both think the premise outruns what Carpenter does with it, with scenes that miss the drama they set up. Den of Geek flags dated handling of gender and race while still recommending it. The spread is narrow, from lukewarm to warm; the lowest scores come from critics who still find it watchable, and nobody argues it is a bad film, only a rougher one than its reputation suggests.
Freer calls the film highly entertaining and praises its cool, effective sci-fi setup. He singles out Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken as the standout, with an unusually compelling mix of anger, coolness and wit.
Read the full review →Gonzalez finds the film’s politics strikingly immediate and its analog-minded subversion resonant. He singles out Snake’s final act and the cassette as a potent expression of analog bringing opposing nations together.
Read the full review →Hoad considers Escape from New York close to Carpenter’s peak, with Snake Plissken giving it a strong focal point. He praises the film’s ramshackle analogue of crime-ridden 1970s New York and its broad, self-aware social satire.
Read the full review →Knight gives the film a strongly positive verdict, praising its intriguing premise, effective cast and expert execution. He especially singles out the convincing future-New York setting and its striking production design and photography.
Read the full review →Bitel views the film as an eerily prescient dystopian thriller that remains compelling. He singles out its bleak vision of a broken police state and its anarchic final gesture.
Read the full review →The review calls the film a solidly satisfying actioner, though its execution falls short of its premise. It praises the imaginative, fun special-effects work while faulting some scenes for not reaching their dramatic potential.
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Assault on Precinct 13 · not reviewed yetCarpenter’s earlier siege: fewer people, one building, the same long night and bass line.
The Warriors · not reviewed yetAnother New York after dark, crossed on foot by people who would rather not be there.
Mad Max 2The same year, the same surly loner, with cars instead of streets and daylight instead of dark.
Dredd · not reviewed yetA tower block as prison, a laconic lawman, and action staged with the clarity Carpenter sometimes lacks.
Children of MenBritain as the broken state, a reluctant man escorting a precious passenger through it.
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