An uncommonly long-delayed sequel, and a medium-volume hoot. It is now A.D. 2013, or anyway it will be as soon as we pass through a preamble that explains how the Big One of the year 2000 created the Island of Los Angeles, thereafter converted into a prison colony of undesirables in the new "Moral America" under a right-wing lifetime President. Our mental arithmetic tells us that our present-day United States is not quite on a pace to catch up with the vision of 1997 laid out in 1981's Escape from New York. But little matter. The sequel applies itself with some dedication to the principal and somewhat paradoxical task of futuristic science fiction, an active involvement in the affairs of today. The insurrectionist firebrand, Cuervo Jones, is simply a contemporary ghetto gang-banger magnified a millionfold by his possession of a Black Box doomsday weapon -- gift of the President's Patty Hearstian turncoat daughter, Utopia. Other denizens of this toppled metropolis have their familiar forerunners as well: the mellow surfer dude (Peter Fonda, well at ease with a line like "You're pretty far-out, man. I mean, cool"); Map-to-the-Stars Eddie (Steve Buscemi) in his porkpie hat and convertible pimpmobile; the tenor transsexual (Pam Grier: what a surprising and delightful cast!); and best of all, the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills (Bruce Campbell), a sort of Dr. Moreau mad scientist ruling an underworld of face-lift freaks who can now cling to youth only through grafted body parts. The comic-book action staged by John Carpenter, director also of the New York Escape, is too ridiculous to be remotely involving or exciting, if not too much so to be remotely amusing: e. g., a surfboard chasing down a car on the crest of a post-earthquake tsunami. Still, Carpenter takes the looming apocalypse quite seriously. And the piratically eye-patched Kurt Russell, doing his best sotto voce Clint Eastwood impression, donning a "fire-retardant" get-up of gunslinger's black leather, and somehow maintaining a high degree of dignity throughout, rises at the finish to the full stature of the Antichrist, or agent thereof, punching up the code "666" on the Black Box's remote-control activator. At that point and even more at the next point -- a truly liberal blow for individualism, freedom, democracy, even if it entails an un-P.C. preference for cigarettes or fur coats -- it wouldn't be inappropriate to trace the lineage of this character (nickname of "Snake": hmm) to the twisted heroes of the early 19th-century Romantic Movement: the Byronic egoist, the brooding rebel, the cutthroat, the antisocial outcast, the fallen angel. This is a heavy load, and Russell shoulders it effortlessly. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd