Ricardo Franco’s review published on Letterboxd:
Quarantine Movie #44
Like a lot of Carpenter’s films, Escape to New York is an exercise in mood. The score is incredible and the production design is probably the best element. My main issue with the film is that I just didn’t care.
For a 90 min film this felt long. The first 32 minutes are just exposition dumps and mood building. We don’t get to the meat of stuff until 1/3 of the way through.
Snake is great and he steals every scene he’s in, but outside of Snake everyone feels like a red shirt and they’re inevitably treated as such.
I loved the production design, in a weird way this is the closest we’ll probably get to a Bioshock movie. I loved seeing this run down city full of splicers, sorry I meant crazies.
Escape to New York barely held my attention and ended up being a rather dull experience. I have to admit that I thought the same of Halloween when I first saw it, and it’s now one of my favorite films. So who knows, maybe I just need to revisit this some other time.