I won’t say that Escape from L.A. wasn’t working for me from the get-go – the first diegetic image is pretty stellar shot of the Sam Fuller school, a quick-fire slug of Nazi-adjacent American soldiers lined up against the camera, as though blockading it from access to some dark secret behind them – but the moment where John Carpenter’s fifteen-years-later sequel clicked for me is the one where it seems to completely collapse. When our resident eye-patched libertarian outlaw Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is tasked with rescuing a black box containing US satellite codes from post-apocalyptic prison-colony Los Angeles, he takes a one-man submersible into L.A., which is now separated from the rest of the U.S. and only accessible via air and water. We, however, take a roughly 60 second slalom through some of the roughest mid-‘90s CG you can imagine, Snake’s comically sleek submarine hurtling through an abstract void that is meant to connote “water”, passing by a toxic garbage plate of pixels registering ever-so-briefly as a “shark”. Finally, in a split-second, we rush past the drowned Universal Studios sign, now a lost relic from a forgotten age. The shark suddenly clarifies as a CG travesty of Universal’s great hit Jaws, itself a famously iffy effect thoughtfully used in only privileged moments, and Escape from L.A. clarifies its own status as one of the great Hollywood piss-takes, a mockery that is also a howl of frustration aimed at what Hollywood had done to Carpenter’s medium of choice. The title is not a not a statement of fact but a genuine wish, not a declarative claim but a plea for help.

Judging from the rest of the film, its deeply caustic ambivalence and jovial nihilism, its playful absurdity and nasty cruelty, it is impossible to read this as anything other than a vicious take-down of the idea of a CG action sequence, a curdled critique of the limits of Hollywood, even the idea of making a sequel to 1981’s Escape from New York. The consequence of this ferocious, even callous brazenness is that the film’s vision of redemption is reduced to apocalypse, and that Carpenter’s vision of anything like politics essentially consists of an empty void, but the beauty of the film is that it registers the sadness of a director reduced to that position. If Escape from New York was a caustic scalpel, Escape from L.A. is a libertarian broadside aimed at society writ-large. Gone is the sense of impromptu, even thorny, community in New York, or Carpenter’s The Thing, with its paranoid ruminations on humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, or Big Trouble in Little China, with its comparatively convivial reflections on the inadequacy of Hollywood male archetypes, or Prince of Darkness’s mercurial meditations on the potential for science and religion to work together. The possibility for human salvation through collectivity has no place in Carpenter’s mature brand of nihilism. While his deeply underrated Christine implicitly assaulted Hollywood’s acts of cinematic necromancy, its inability to fashion anything new and need to feed off the corpses of earlier visions of youth and coolness, Escape from L.A. is his most full-throated bite of the hand that feeds.

In that sense, the cosmic uncertainty of Carpenter’s wonderfully underrated 1994 film In the Mouth of Madness was a pivot point. With its harrowing and sublime investigation of the limits of directorial control and the disturbing psychic and cosmic forces unleashed by the intersection of art and corporatism, Madness seems to have opened a portal from which humanity may have no return. Escape both explodes outward – into a brutal, deliberately un-subtle burst of savage playfulness – and implodes inward, into a cloacal vision of Hollywood’s intestinal tract. When Snake’s submarine lands in L.A., the ground immediately gives out from under it, as if it can’t bear physical soil or withstand real concrete, can’t exist outside the false machinations of a Hollywood CG sequence, but also as though the film is plea-ing for Snake to stay on the island, to not return to a world that has no place for him anymore, to appreciate what Hollywood has to offer. In the vortex of chaos, he has found grace, has located the possibility of home.

From there, we’re off to the races, a transparent, scabrous mockery of Hollywood that is also a celebratory account of Hollywood’s genre-hopping excess, from a simply breathtaking absurdist surf interlude where Snake hangs ten with Peter Fonda, washed ashore from another genre entirely, to a hang-glider ride that ends in Disneyland’s “Happy Kingdom,” now turned into a haven for potential leftist revolt that, the film can only suggest, is another illusion of Hollywood radicalism, a fantasy of immediate satisfaction and sudden solution. Stranded in the middle of all this, we start one sequence where Snake is about to punished passing by several scenes of gladiatorial combat, Carpenter teasing a replay of the same set-piece from Escape from New York, before we learn Snake’s fate, a hilarious undercut: a basketball sequence, five shots without missing, ten seconds for each shot. It’s the mid-‘90s, Carpenter seems to suggest, and we need a basketball film in our map to the stars.

More generally, Escape from L.A. film is a work obsessed with the fabrication of Hollywood mythology, from the obvious (Bruce Campbell as the Surgeon General of Beverley Hills, who collects bodies to recover skin to keep his scions perennially beautiful) to more subtle remarks, such as the continual refrain “I Thought You’d Be Taller” that becomes a sort of needling chorus throughout the film for characters who meet Plissken. Snake twice attempts to assault or kill his U.S. government captors early on, reminding him that they know more tricks than he can muster, and that he, and we, will have to learn that we are being manipulated and may have to play the same game to get our revenge. Snake finally learns this in his phenomenally disastrous exit from the film, a blast of cosmic nihilism rarely seen in any film, let alone a blockbuster.

In many ways, Snake has to learn what, and if, Hollywood manipulation has anything to offer him. In a stellar sequence, he sets the stage for an Old Hollywood standoff against his enemies and then devastates the very rules he sets up. Shooting before he says he will, his opponents ae too locked in their Hollywood idiom, in the L.A. vision they still, however loosely, assent to, to know what hit them. The tensions are deep here. There is remarkable ambivalence within the film: for all that the film posits L.A. as the last vestige of possible freedom, L.A. itself is also a transparent theme park, a self-conscious Hollywood vision of absurd that is both celebrated and lamented by Carpenter, who seems to suggest that no other freedom may be possible other than that afforded by Hollywood, that the only forms of freedom we’ve been reduced to are those proffered by American movie fantasies. From here, Carpenter would return to collectives in Vampires and Ghosts of Mars, but both of those films offer little possibility of escape.

It’s not a subtle film, you can probably tell, but it isn’t dumb. When Snake tells the feds that he’s lost his hologram projector, for instance, we’re meant to intuit that he’s lied to them when he achieves a devastatingly mischievous coup with it at the conclusion, even though the film never explicitly reminds us that we’ve been lied to by our protagonist an hour earlier. The film knows that we’re watching, and maybe not watching well enough. When we first meet Steve Buscemi’s “Maps to the Stars Eddie,” he sidles into the frame behind Snake as the latter is resting in placid repose, quietly frustrated to himself, yet also posing in classic Hollywood bearing. He too is a star charting his course, the film seems to say, but he is also being charted, both by others around him and by decades of Hollywood archetypes he cannot fully shake off, and that this film cannot escape from. How else to explain the final shot. Having shut down the world, Russell interrupts his own final moment of solitude, only to catch a stray suspicion and stare at the camera, striking a cheery-nasty pose for the viewers he now acknowledges. Snake, the film seems to know, simply can’t exist as a real person. The only home he can know is an assemblage of smoke and mirrors. In his quest for escape, he comes to realize that he was always-already a cinematic type. He isn’t our savior, and he doesn’t want to be, but Hollywood cinema can’t actually posit a kind of hero useful for everyday life. The best thing the film can do is conclude, to turn this film’s end into a thesis on film’s end. We, the film says, can only be left to our own devices.

Score: 9/10