ESCAPE FROM LA.
135 min (Cinema release in UK, Europe and USA)

What can we say? A whole gang of us went to see this (all fans of the original Carpenter film), and we all came away with various degrees of 'disappointed' written on our faces. What made it worse was the original film was shown on TV shortly before we went to see the sequal and it was still just as good as ever - dark, brooding, original.

Escape from LA is not so much a sequal as a remake of the original with a bigger budget - there's CGI graphics, neat weapons (looking like they were borrowed from Space Above and Beyond), big sets and lots of extras. But ultimately this is just a glossy Hollywood action flick, a bit of politcially correct satire and one-line humour that was never in the original, lots of explosions and not a lot else. This is a film wading through its own bloody corpse and not smelling so good because of it.

Even the dialogue is interchangeable between the movies - "Hi Snake, heard you were dead" or "Hi Snake, thought you would be taller". Take your pick, the Legoland approach to script design.

What makes it worse is that this was made with full creative control firmly in the hands of Kurt Russell and Carpenter, the original team responsible for Easpe from New York. Didn't they realise why the first film was so well thought of? Did they think that by reshooting it as an Arnie-style action movie they would attract a mass audience and make lots of money? It's nowhere near in the same league as Independece Day - so goodbye mass audience - and it's a reanimated zombie of the original - so goodbye fans.

It's rare you see a SF movie that shouldn't have been made; but this is one of them.

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