YMMV / Escape from L.A.

• Anvilicious: While the satire in New York was a lot less specific and aimed more for a general dark look at what future society could become, L.A. goes way into specifics in terms of having an ultra-evil conservative president and some of the most obvious satirical jabs at L.A. culture.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Snake's Uniform". Yes, at this this point, Snake is badass enough to have his own Leitmotif.
  • "The One" by White Zombie, heard over the end credits.
  • Also, give Carpenter credit for being just about the only filmmaker in Hollywood (other than Wong and Morgan) to give Shirley Walker a real shot in movies.
  • This badass remix of the Escape from New York theme, which plays over this movie's opening credits.
• Complete Monster:
  • The President for Life institutes a despotic, totalitarian theocracy in America, banning most leisure activities and exiling countless people to certain death in the hellhole that LA has become, with the only escape being their own requested execution. Sending Snake Plissken into Los Angeles to retrieve his renegade daughter Utopia, the President tries to order the city bombed when things seem to be going wrong. The President later tries to have his own daughter executed when she is recovered and tries to use the Sword of Damocles EMP to shut down the invading nations, without care for any death as a consequence.
  • The Surgeon General of Beverly Hills has a reputation for letting nobody leave his domain alive. Capturing any who venture into Beverly Hills, the Surgeon General dissects them and removes their parts to graft to his legions of mutant followers, dismissing several mutilated corpses as insufficient for his needs before moving on to "fresh" materials in Snake and his ally, planning to carve them up while still alive.
• Contested Sequel: Some people think the movie's a piece of garbage, while others think it's just as good as Escape from New York. A third camp actually thinks it's better. (Rumor has it that last camp includes John Carpenter himself.)
• Cult Classic: The film underperformed at release and put the kibosh on further film entries in the franchise, but has garnered a reputation in the years since, generating enough interest for Shout! Factory to release a Collector's Edition version of the movie in 2020.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Despite Snake shutting down the Earth to foil the President's plans, the movie treats it like a good thing as it at least gives humanity another chance to start over.
• Funny Moments: The subversions to the plot becomes pretty hilarious, specifically Snake running at the President only for it to be a hologram or even how the virus he's been infected with is just the flu.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The "tsunami surfing" scene's humor falls a bit flat in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake or the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan.
  • Snake shutting down the world is both this and hilarious on account of the Ontario Ice Storm in 2013. It's a double whammy since Canada was the original Escape Plan in Escape from New York, and this movie taking place in a fictional 2013.
  • One of the minor characters is a woman who was deported to the island simply for being Muslim. In 1996, when there really wasn't much anti-Muslim sentiment, this was intended more to show the destruction of freedom (in this case, of religion) under the President Evil's rule. Come 2001...
  • Utopia, sheltered and troubled woman, is seduced to join a violent terrorist organization via cyberspace. Eerily, similar girls and women would do the same, joining the Islamic State mostly through online outreach programs between 2014 and 2015
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This wouldn't be the last time Rob Zombie would be involved with a John Carpenter movie.
  • Bangkok has apparently been renamed New Vegas.
  • The President's delivery of the line "You didn't finish the mission, Snake" makes him sound a lot like Colonel Campbell. He even has a similar face.
  • The remotes ("Everyone's got one") are highly reminiscent of Smartphones (though in a Zeerusty way).
  • It wouldn't be too far to compare Utopia with a fairy-tale princess, though one with a very twisted "king" for a father (one who only wants her rescued so he can have her executed, for example). Her actress, A. J. Langer, went on to become Countess of Devon after she married the son of Hugh Courtenay, 18th Earl of Devon, following his death and her husband's assumption of the title of 19th Earl of Devon.
  • In the intro, LA is cut off from the United States by a massive earthquake turning it into an island. The TV movie 10.5, a Disaster Movie based around a giant earthquake, ends with California broken off from the mainland by the quake. Cue waves of jokes that 10.5 is a stealth prequel to Escape from LA.
• Ho Yay: An interesting variation; Snake is not only completely unfazed to find his former ally Carjack Malone is now a glamorous trans woman named Hershe Las Palmas, his first move is to reach into her skirt and grab the small-caliber pistol concealed in her thigh holster (after VERY suggestively running his hand up her stockinged leg).
• Inferred Holocaust: Snake Plissken stops all electricity, all over the Earth. Actually, it does not seem like anyone could really consider there to be any "winners" in that movie, unless you think that cutting the power was going to stop the world^note and by 'the world' we mean 'the United States' from tearing itself apart.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A common complaint with the film is that it’s story structure is beat for beat a retread or Escape from New York, only with a slightly different ending, a change in location from New York to L.A., and an even more shoehorned in political allegory.
• It Was His Sled: Snake hits the entire world with the EMP.
• Just Here for Godzilla: While the movie is considered a decent sequel the ending in which Snake shuts down the world's power is considered one of the best movie endings ever.
• Moral Event Horizon: The President has already proven himself a fundamentalist lunatic who purposely introduced a tyrannical new regime in the United States and views the rest of the world as scum to be destroyed. He later shows that he was serious about the orders he gave Snake when he orders his own daughter killed by electrocution even after her return to the mainland, visibly disgusting even Snake.
• Narm Charm: Snake surfing a tsunami down a spillway. Incredibly stupid, and incredibly awesome.
• One-Scene Wonder: Bruce Campbell as the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills.
• Retroactive Recognition: Kurt's son Wyatt Russell has an Uncredited Role as an unnamed orphan boy.
• Signature Scene: Snake inputing the World Code and plunging the world into eternal blackness.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus is that L.A. is an enjoyable action flick that doesn’t match the quality of its predecessor, or many of Carpenter’s other movies.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • While the model shots of a freeway collapsing in the opening sequence still look good for their age, others (like a faultline going off in front of an L.A. theatre) fall flat, considering there's hardly anyone on the street and the destruction looks like a controlled explosion. This was apparently by design, as shown in FX reels found by the webmaster of The Snake Plissken Wiki in 2020.
  • Several of the green-screen shots aren't composited correctly, making them look very dodgy — the moment where Snake jumps his bike into the back of a truck is a prime example, as it looks like Snake's bike is "gliding" into the back of the vehicle, as he and his bike appear to magically grow in size.
  • The final CGI sequence of the Sword of Damocles satellites activating is remarkably inept, looking a good 5-10 years more out-of-date than the rest of the film. This can possibly be explained by the fact that Carpenter had to hire a secondary FX studio late in the film's production when their original choice didn't work out.
  • Everything about the minisub Snake uses to get into LA is similarly awfully rendered, especially the view through its front view (including a ludicrously fake looking shark almost eat the sub). Even the sub itself looks obviously poorly CG'ed in when Snake gets out of it. Notably, behind-the-scenes FX reels discovered in 2020 show that a version of the scene was filmed with a practical model being used when Snake reaches the shoreline, but this was replaced with a dodgy-looking CGI minisub for unknown reasons.
  • The irony is that the basic low budget effects from its predecessor are far better than the expensive CGI effects used in this film.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Surgeon General appears onscreen for less than five minutes, but in that time manages to establish himself as an utterly depraved villain on par with the film's Big Bad, and it's unfortunate that we didn't get to see more of him. Being played by Bruce Campbell certainly helps.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Snake's a murderous criminal, almost everyone in LA is some degree of asshole, and the people Snake's working for are even worse.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Just as its predecessor was this to the early '80s when New York City and other old East Coast/Midwestern cities were seen as trapped in an intractable downward spiral, so is this film to the late '90s, when Los Angeles' public image had taken a beating in the wake of the Rodney King riots, the Rampart scandal, and the rise of Gangsta Rap. The President Evil of the dystopian near-future United States is a Christian theocrat based on Jerry Falwell (right down to them sharing the same hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia), reflecting public concern over the power of the Christian Right at the time. The villain Cuervo Jones is a member of the Shining Path, a Peruvian communist revolutionary group that, in the film, has taken over all of Latin America and is poised to invade the US; in real life, the Shining Path was already being rolled up by the Peruvian military by 1996, and is largely disorganized today. There's even a joke made at the expense of Euro Disney Resort, with one character claiming that it drove Disney into bankruptcy. On the other hand, the fact that one of the minor characters is a woman who was dumped onto the Los Angeles prison island for being a Muslim proved eerily prescient, given how The War on Terror stoked anti-Muslim attitudes throughout the US and Europe.

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