a review of 纽约大逃亡

#85 (March 26/31) Saw that this had reappeared on Netflix streaming, and figured I'd take another look after having heard news of the Robert Rodriguez remake. Although I've been a big fan of this movie ever since I first caught it on VHS as a teenager, I've always felt like it was ripe for re-imagining in a higher-budget/higher-stakes context. In some ways, I think what I want is for somebody (not necessarily Carpenter) to do for EfNY what George Miller did with Fury Road, and take all of the memorable franchise iconography and really take it to the next level. As it is, the movie itself is very entertaining, if a bit slight in terms of actual incident plotwise. There's a lot of opportunities that come up in the film that never really get fully capitalized upon, mainly that we're introduced to two equally matched factions (the Duke's gang and the military police just over the wall) but the two never really come up against each other, and are mainly there to take turns menacing Snake and his allies. If Snake's incursion resulted in a huge NYC-wide prison riot with active confrontation between inmates and the feds, that could have been an interesting backdrop for the big escape, but instead we get a pretty standard car chase and gunfight. The $6M budget only went so far, I suppose.