Kurt Russell has always been a bad ass and played cinema's most underrated bad ass in Snake Plissken. Escape from New York is one of John Carpenter's finest and Big Trouble in Little China was one of the finest films of the 80's. Despite Russell's lengthy career, he is very rarely mentioned when pondering great action heroes. It's always Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger. He played a man with an eye-patch! Nothing is cooler than Kurt Russell in an eye-patch. The less said about Tarantino's disaster, Death Proof, the better, but Russell and his role as Snake Plissken is definitively iconic. Kurt Russell has made an awful lot of rubbish over the years, including appearances in Sky High, Tango and Cash, Vanilla Sky and 3000 Miles to Graceland. He did take us back close to those eighties highs with mid-nineties flick Executive Decision which co-starred Steven Seagal, but after the failure that was Escape from LA, his career has come to a halt, only to be briefly revived and buried again by Quentin Tarantino. But the highs of the eighties with The Thing, Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China far outweigh the negatives, and Russell's screen presence makes Escape from New York still feel fresh today.