The Escape From New York remake has finally found a director in Die Hard 4.0’s Len Wiseman. Before Die Hard, ol’ Wisey was best known for putting his wife, Kate Beckinsale in a cat-suit for the whole world to see in the Underworld films.
Wiseman is quite a competent director and as John McClane’s recent outing proved, he can more than handle big-budget action favourites from the 80s.
For those who weren’t alive/don’t have a keen awareness of 80s awesomeness, Escape from New York was a John Carpenter film set in the vast future of the year 1997, where the island of Manhattan has been turned into a prison colony. Hired to rescue the marooned President from the island is eye-patched super bad-ass Snake Plissken.
The real question is, can the new Snake Plissken Gerard Butler fill the enormous shoes left behind by Kurt Russell? It’s a tough call, but we’re saying yes. For Christ’s sake people, he was Leonidas.
Of course, the whole idea of resurrecting Plisken is just further evidence that the 80s are being slowly dragged back, kicking and screaming. Rambo, Rocky and John McClane have all made it back. The natural progression would suggest that we could be viewing McGyver: Reloaded by 2009.
Source: Variety
