Brass balls, Breck Eisner. Brass balls. After tempting fate with a gargantuan failure of a debut in “Sahara,” a movie that lost tens of millions and resulted in an extremely nasty lawsuit, Eisner, son of Michael, dared to take on George A. Romero’s counterculture thriller “The Crazies.” After turning the liberal politics of that picture into apathetic modern day libertarianism, he’s prepared to take on another product of its time, John Carpenter’s “Escape From New York.”
The “Escape” remake has been bouncing around for awhile now with esteemed names like Len Wiseman, Brett Ratner, Johnathan Mostow, Gerard Butler and Josh Brolin attached, though it seems to have gained momentum recently when original director John Carpenter signed off on the redo as a credited producer, putting his name to a contract stipulating the film’s protagonist Snake Plissken must “always be a badass” among other specific requests in keeping with the source material. In essence, while Carpenter was probably stoned as he’s been for the larger part of the last decade, he essentially said, “You have to find another Kurt Russell.” Ain’t no more of those around, are there?
The talent associated with this effort speaks for itself, though we don’t know much about the reportedly downgraded approach from screenwriter Allen Loeb (the original’s nuke has been replaced with a radioactive dirty bomb, allowing for cheaper sets most likely). Still, the track record is well-known – “Halloween,” “The Fog” and “Assault On Precinct 13th” have already been remade from Carpenter’s body of work, and none have held a candle to the originals. Also, did Neil Marshall not cover this territory already with “Doomsday,” featuring a bombed-out city and a one-eyed badass protagonist on a suicide mission for an apathetic government?