John Carpenter, in the middle of one of the most impossibly great runs that a genre director has ever had, turns this dystopian set-up into a swaggering showcase for Kurt Russell’s eyepatch-wearing antihero Snake Plissken, who, in exchange for a pardon for robbing the Federal Reserve, is strong-armed into going in and rescuing the commander in chief.
The premise: In the near future, America’s crime rate explodes. The solution: Turn the island of Manhattan into a maximum-security Alcatraz and ship all of the worst criminals there to fend for themselves (not a huge stretch—New York City already felt that way at the time). The inciting incident: The U.S. president (Donald Pleasance) has been taken hostage and is now MIA in that New York hellhole. John Carpenter, in the middle of one of the most impossibly great runs that a genre director has ever had, turns this dystopian set-up into a swaggering showcase for Kurt Russell’s eyepatch-wearing antihero Snake Plissken, who, in exchange for a pardon for robbing the Federal Reserve, is strong-armed into going in and rescuing the commander in chief. The catch: He has 24 hours…and the clock starts now. There is literally no part of Escape from New York that is not 100 percent perfection.