Carpenter triples down on the B-movie satire. Triple the contrivances and triple the cheese. Bad move, in my opinion. Even worse, it just goes from one mini-adventure to another with no cohesion. The movie feels much longer than 100 minutes.

Compared to how George Miller's Mad Max series evolved, I would've welcomed a sequel more in the vain of a kid-friendly action-adventure like Beyond Thunderdome rather than this B-movie mess. In fact, Lockout did just that. Though there are some fun moments in Escape from L.A., it's just not a worthy sequel to the original and is a bit of a disservice to it. The cool factor is all but gone. All that is left is satire.