Escape from LA (1996)

Fifteen years after his triumphal extraction of the American President from the prison-island of Manhattan, Snake Plissken is, as the poster says, BACK. This time, the powers-that-be control all of the United States and exile all undesirables to Los Angeles, which has been cut off from the rest of the country by an apocalyptic earthquake which was predicted by the evil religious President. LA is now an autonomous island (sound familiar?) ruled by freaks, gangs, and prostitutes. A South American instigator named Cuervo Jones (that name is the textual equivalent of the scene in "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars" [2001] when the guy goes to chop into a tin can to impress a girl and chops three of his fingers off instead) has invaded the dream virtual reality-space of the President's daughter Utopia and convinced her to steal an important black briefcase from her dad and meet him in LA with it. Snake is supposed to find the black briefcase and bring it back to the powers-that-be, and he only has half a day to do it in, because they've injected him with some sort of slow-acting virus that will eventually kill him unless he gets the antidote.

Russell delivers every line with a scornful hiss at the end, and there's a scene where he and Peter Fonda surf through the streets of LA, and Cuervo forces him to play a form of elimination basketball in which the penalty for not making enough baskets is death (guess what, Snake beats the system!) It's totally cheesy and delightful, and the end, when Snake decides that he is going to activate the device in the black briefcase and cut off every piece of electronic equipment in the world, thereby destabilizing everything and wrecking both the President's and Cuervo's dreams of control, only made me wish that we could see what happens next.