1981 action, dir. John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, Adrienne Barbeau:
IMDb /
allmovie. Are you a bad
enough dude to save the president?
After Top Gun and Maverick I wanted a film that we at Ribbon
of Memes could honestly enjoy. So it was back to John Carpenter and
Kurt Russell (The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China).
And I had never seen this before; for whatever reason, I missed it
when it came out. Now I realise just how huge an influence this was on
the "tough guy" archetype, not just in film but in RPG characters and
video games.
But first of course we get some world-building. What is it that
appeals about the "no guards, no escape, no release" prison? I suppose
if you give up all notion of reform or the possibility that your
system will ever make an error, but in spite of being that kind of
bastard you don't have the guts sinply to execute people… oh, wait.
Never mind.
But there's also that very 1980s idea of the big cities being so lost
to crime that they'll never be brought back and you just have to wall
them off from the Real People (see Oath of Fealty from the same
year). It's not explicit here, but that's clearly the reason why you'd
turn the extremely expensive island of Manhattan into a prison rather
than simply sending in the troops to kill everyone. Carpenter admitted
to inspiration from Death Wish, and there's a little Watergate in
here too.
But I admit it, I am shallow. Quite early in the film, when an
aircraft appears to be in distress, a controller says "Squawk 7700,
contact on 121.5" and that is the exact right thing to say in that
situation. In other words, whoever wrote or edited that line took the
trouble to take a few minutes to find out the correct thing and put it
in their script, rather than the usual vaguely right-ish sounding slop
that's standard for films. After that I was in a much more positive
mood for the real action.
This is not, interestingly, a "realistic" Boeing 707 as was in use for
Air Force One at the time; it's got more of a Convair style tail,
presumably because the crew could get access to a wrecked Convair tail
that can be used in the background of later shots. Of course, no Air
Force One has ever had a documented escape pod (the thing sometimes
presented as one is the crew capsule from a B-58 Hustler), but it's a
widely held belief that it does, largely because of this film.
All in all it's a terribly synthetic setup: the president is on foot
in the huge prison island, and has to be got back before the deadline.
But at least it's a setup that makes some sort of sense. And once we
get out of the setup, the whole thing runs on Kurt Russell's charm and
charisma, and that makes up for any number of flaws.
This is a very dark film, but Carpenter has the trick (as also seen in
Assault on Precinct 13) of making a scene look dark but leaving it
clear what's going on while hiding any deficiencies of set dressing.
I am amused by Snake's main gun: not only is it a "silenced" MAC-10,
the second-rate 1980s submachine gun for people who couldn't get Uzis,
it has all the crap bolted on to it tp make it look cool.
Why is there that scene in Chock Full O' Nuts? Season Hubley was
Russell's wife at the time. But it's always good to see Adrienne
Barbeau, and Harry Dean Stanton, even if there is actually not a whole
lot of oil sitting under Manhattan Island waiting to be extracted.
We're told that the mines on the bridges are so terrifying that nobody
could possibly make it across. But when we see people doing it, they
take casualties, but… one can't help feeling that a sufficiently
ruthless prison boss would simply force a human wave attack, lose
perhaps a few dozen people, then have a clear run at the wall.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.