Thanks to the marvelous invention of the VCR, my childhood was comprised watching a number of R-rated action movies repeatedly, and one of them was the John Carpenter 1981 cult classic Escape From New York.
Because Kurt Russell was a Disney star in the 1960s and 1970s, film legend John Carpenter had to convince movie head honchos that Russell was the right person for the lead role. Indeed, Kurt Russell was perfectly suited to play the ex-Special Forces soldier turned criminal, and I think there should have been more movies with Snake Plissken, including a prequel.
When I saw Luc Besson's Lockout in 2012, it was hard to overlook the movie plot's similarities to Escape From New York. In the future, a criminal is sent into a maximum-security prison isolated from the rest of the world, à la Alcatraz, to rescue a highly important person. There's a briefcase with important contents, and our hero has to survive a bunch of murderous crazies.
Escape From New York and Lockout are so similar John Carpenter sued Luc Besson and won.
While Lockout "borrowed" heavily from Escape From New York and wasn't well-received by audiences and critics, Lockout has original concepts. There's a subplot about a CIA mission gone wrong, and the prison is in outer space. Guy Pearce doesn't wear an eyepatch, but he's armed with plenty of jokes, and Maggie Grace (Taken, The Hurricane Heist) plays opposite Pearce as the U.S. President's daughter in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Even though Luc Besson didn't direct the film, Lockout is one of my favorite films from the French filmmaker (Taken, The Fifth Element) and is an immensely underrated action thriller. The first trailer I saw doesn't do this movie justice. Lockout may not be original, but, in my opinion, it has excellent writing, action, and some hilarious one-liners.
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