FILM REVIEW OF "ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK" (1981)

Director John Carpenter didn’t make “Escape from New York” into the iconic cult hit that he did with “Halloween.” Although this futuristic tough-guy thriller inspired only one sequel and several knock-offs, it didn’t forge the numerous sequels and remakes that “Halloween” spawned. According to Box Office.Mojo, the low-budgeted “Escape from New York” (**1/2 out of ****) coined $50 million worldwide on a mere seven-million dollar budget so it qualifies as a solid hit. Carpenter manages to put every cent on film. When you consider that most of the film was lensed in St. Louis rather than Gotham, this is impressive. Carpenter was limited to what he could show so he conceals well enough. The only time that Manhattan in totality appears as a prison is in the map scenes. The scenes in New York City appear realistic enough in what constituted a prison hellhole lighted with fires that cast ominous shadows. Interestingly, nobody but Carpenter saw Kurt Russell as integral to the lead role as Snake Plissken. The studio preferred Charles Bronson, but Carpenter thought Bronson was too old. Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Donald Pleasance, Adrienne Barbeau, and Harry Dean Stanton co-star.

“Escape from New York” opens with some expository narrative that Carpenter said they decided to incorporate to give audiences a leg up on the setting and background of the story. Graphics accompany the following narration: “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.” Basically, World War III is drawing to a close, and the anonymous President (Donald Pleasance of “Halloween”) is flying in Air Force One when a terrorist masquerading as a stewardess hijacks it. She broadcasts a defiant proclamation: “Tell this to the workers when they ask where their leader went. We, the soldiers of The National Liberation Front of America, in the name of the workers and all the oppressed of this imperialist country, have struck a fatal blow to the fascist police state. What better revolutionary example than to let their president perish in the inhuman dungeon of his own imperialist prison.” Before Air Force One crashes, the President climbs into a pod and the pod is expelled from the aircraft.

Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef of “For Few Dollars More”) discusses a plan with the Vice President to send in a hardened criminal facing a life sentence in Manhattan to rescue the chief executive. He chooses a former war hero, Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), because Snake has flown an ultra-quiet glider called the Gullfire during the war in Leningrad. When Hauk went in earlier to save the President, the thugs in the street warned him that they would kill the President unless Hauk and his men took off in 30 seconds. Hauk offers the reluctant Plissken amnesty for all his crimes if he will bring the President out in less than twenty-four hours. You see, Snake had been arrested for trying to rob a Federal Bank. Snake doesn’t exactly leap at the offer and Hauk explains that time is of the essence. The President was scheduled to appear at the critical Hartford Summit to deliver an audio cassette that had a message on it about nuclear fusion. It is essential that the President appears with that message.

Plissken agrees to fly the Gullfire and bring out the President. Nevertheless, the suspicious Hauk takes special precautions to ensure Snake’s loyalty. He explains how he will keep Snake from flying the other way once Snake is airborne. “ Two microscopic capsules lodged in your arteries. They're already starting to dissolve. In 22 hours, the cores will completely dissolve. Inside the cores are a heat-sensing charge. Not a large explosion, about the size of a pinhead, just big enough to open up both of your arteries. I'd say you'd be dead in 10-15 seconds...” Predictably, Snake is not thrilled at this revelation, but he manages to take it in stride. Our rugged hero flies the Gullfire into Manhattan. Although he lands atop the World Trade Center, he almost plunges over the side. Snake locates the wreckage of Air Force One and finds no survivors. He consults the tracking device that receives signals from the President’s electronic wrist bracelet. Eventually, Snake tracks down the signal, only to discover that a drunk (George ‘Buck’ Flower) is wearing it instead of the Chief Executive. Snake is taken on a tour of the city by the loquacious Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), who has been cruising the city streets in his yellow cab for 30 years. Snake learns from the ‘Brain’ (Harry Dean Stanton) that the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes) has captured the President. Snake tries to rescue the President, but neither are free for long. Snake takes an arrow in the leg and is forced to fight a giant (Ox Baker) in an arena with clubs. Snake defeats the giant and gathers ‘Brain,’ the President, and Maggie and they make a break for the 69th Street Bridge. Earlier, the Duke had planned to lead his army of convicts and storm the bridge. The Duke needed the ‘Brain’ because he had a diagram of where all the land mines where placed.

The formulaic action is dark, hard and gritty, and Carpenter stages the violence with reasonable aplomb. However, Carpenter’s work as music composer, along with Alan Howarth, overshadows his work as director. The opening “Escape from New York” theme is classic stuff! The music invests the film with a palpable sense of atmosphere. Clocking in at 99 minutes, this “Dirty Dozen” type genre film never wears out its welcome. The best parts are the opening twenty minutes and the concluding twenty minutes. Knowing that gigantic wrestler Ox Baker wasn’t trying to throw his punches, but connect them with Russell makes their memorable in the arena as they clobber each other with clubs more realistic. The snake tattoo that Snake wears and his eye-patch look thoroughly believable and Snake’s refrain “Call me Snake” bolsters Russell’s performance. Van Cleef contributes an intimidating mongoose performance. Kurt Russell looks suitably tough as Plissken with a raspy voice, a black eye-patch, and a beard.

“Escape from New York” emerges an above-average but threadbare thriller.

FILM REVIEW OF ''G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF THE COBRA" (2009)

“Van Helsing” director Stephen Sommers pays tribute to several Hollywood blockbusters in his latest effort “G.I. Joe, The Rise of the Cobra,” (*** out of ****)the second-live action film celebrating the legendary line of Hasbro action figures. Sommers makes allusions in “G.I. Joe” to the James Bond epics “Moonraker,” “Thunderball,” and “The Spy Who Loved Me” as well as the Clint Eastwood Cold War thriller “Firefox” and Jean-Claude Van Damme sci-fi flick “Universal Soldier. “G.I. Joe” bristles with larger-than-life heroes and villains clashing with super-charged weapons amid futuristic pyrotechnics. Not surprisingly, characterization takes a backseat to the high-octane, adrenalin-laced action sequences. Sadly, the formulaic storyline doesn’t spring as many surprises as most big action films, but Sommers keeps the action moving swiftly.

A treacherous Scottish arms dealer named James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston of "Dr. Who"), who is in league with a vast criminal organization called COBRA, has spent ten years creating a apocalyptic new weapon with NATO funding. McCullen’s Mars Weapons Company have subverted microscopic green nanomites originally used to eliminate cancer into feisty little buggers can munch their way through either the armor on an army tank or the Eiffel Tower. McCullen presents this formidable weapon to NATO, and our two heroes, U.S. Army officers Duke (Channing Tatum of “Public Enemies”) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans of “Dance Movie”), escort it via a heavily armed convoy with Apache helicopters flying overhead as escorts. Out of nowhere the military escort is ambushed. A stealthy ninja in white, Storm Shadow (South Korean superstar Byung-hun Lee), and a spectacularly sexy kick-butt babe-in-black, the Baroness (Sienna Miller of “Factory Girl”), try to steal the suitcase containing the four warheads with the deadly nano technology. Duke recognizes the Baroness as a girl that he almost married. Fortunately, our heroes manage to hang onto the warheads because the elite G.I. Joe commando team intervenes and thwarts the villains. A black-clad ninja, Snake Eyes (Ray Park of “Fanboys”), crosses swords with Shadow Storm. As we learn afterwards, these guys have a history of hate. Later, the villains manage to reprogram a homing device in the suitcase and the Baroness and her team invades the G.I. Joe headquarters—called the Pit--deep beneath the desert sands of the Sahara in Egypt. They catch the heroes off guard, wound General Hawk, and steal the warheads.

McCullen has teamed up with a malevolent scientific genius, the Doctor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt of “The Look Out”), who injects this nano serum into soldiers. We see one soldier thrust his arm into a glass case housing a venomous cobra and the snake bites him. The soldier withdraws his arm and the nano technology in his bloodstream repels the venom. You see it leak out of his wounds. We're talking some bad mothers here! McCullen wants to demonstrate to the world how lethal his cannibalistic nano technology is and dispatches his minions to Paris to destroy the Eiffel Tower. Meanwhile, Duke and Ripcord convince General Hawk (Dennis Quaid of “Vantage Point”) to let them join the team in exchange for Duke’s information about the Baroness. Duke had planned to marry her, but things got complicated when he made a promise to look after her brother during a raid in Africa. Our heroes pass all the grueling trials, including some devised by a combat instructor (Brendan Fraser of the “Mummy” movies in a cameo). Duke and Ripcord don a couple of accelerator outfits, created by the Stan Winston Studio, which enable them to hoof it around Paris at 40 miles per hour, dodge missiles streaking toward them, and hurtle cars like daredevils, as they pursue the Baroness and Shadow Storm. This qualifies as the best action scene in “G.I. Joe.”

At 118 minutes, “G.I. Joe” rarely sacrifices its momentum, except to plunge us into frequent flashbacks so we can learn important events that shaped the lives of the heroes and the villains. The Stuart Beattie, David Elliot and Paul Lovett screenplay isn't for an instant remotely believable, but the action is pretty exciting. Unfortunately, predictability sets in early, enough so that a couple of revelations lack sufficient punch. Furthermore, Sommers and his scribes shun any effort to create characters here because that would interfere with the hyper-kinetic action sequences.

Sommers directs with a sure hand, but the humor that made his previous movies so charming is conspicuously absent. The chief villain mimics the James Bond villain Drax from “Moonraker” (1979) because he steals his own weapons back from the military. Later, Ripcord pilots a state-of-the-art “Firefox” jet with a sophisticated weapons system that responds to vocal commands instead of hands-on application. He has to chase two deadly missiles before each destroys major world capitals, another cliffhanger “Moonraker” ploy, and blast them to smithereens. The massive polar ice cap base that the COBRA organization has built recalls another Bond bonanza “The Spy Who Loved Me.” Kevin J. O'Connor and Arnold Vosloo are two other “Mummy” cast members who show up here, and Vosloo gets to impersonate the President. The nanomites recall the scarabs that swarmed throughout “The Mummy.”

People who loved the “G.I. Joe” cartoon show might be in a better, more informed position to criticize this actioneer. However, it should be known that Ripcord wasn’t an African-American in the cartoon but the villains did launch an assault on the Eiffel Tower. The performances here are serviceable. Channing Tatum seems rather leaden, but then most action heroes are one-dimensional. Our heroes aren’t as flamboyant as the villains. Christopher Eccleston chews the scenery with considerable relish like his nanomites and makes a fantastic villain, while Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes the most of his evil doctor. Although it isn’t as audacious as “Transformers 2,” “G.I. Joe” ranks as an above-average testosterone thriller, with an ending that leaves the film open to an inevitable sequel.