It's one thing for a movie to add a bit of sports in order to seem a bit cooler. But when it's the sequel to one of the most effortlessly cool movies of the last four decades, such efforts really do leave a bad taste in the mouth. Still, it's not as if Escape From LA is by any means low on bad ideas. This is also the movie in which we see Snake Plissken surf, hang-glide and - perhaps most alarmingly - wear PVC. Arriving 15 years after John Carpenter and Kurt Russell first presented the one-eyed anti-hero to the world in Escape From New York, the 1996 sequel directly retraces the steps of the original almost blow-for-blow, only with action shifted to that other iconic American city. It's also heavy on subpar 90s CGI, making it curiously seem even more dated now than its 1981 predecessor. But as heavily as the film piles on the WTF moments, it's particularly dumbfounding when - as the action reaches the point where, in Escape From New York, Snake entered a gladiatorial arena - we instead have Snake forced into... erm... a basketball court. Here, the sequel's Che Guevara-esque villian Cuervo Jones tells Snake he has to shoot a series of successive hoops within a short time period, and if he misses a single shot he'll be killed. And so, Snake Plissken suddenly turns into Shaquille O'Neal. A very, very strange spectacle indeed, and it's hard to gauge whether they're really playing it straight or not.
