Though produced on a fairly low budget, Escape manages to provide action, suspense and characters you actually care about. Kurt Russell's Eastwood-like character, Snake Plissken is brilliantly done, as is spaghetti-western star Lee Van Cleef's Bob Hauk. I read in interviews that the filmmakers looked upon this movie as more of a joke; if that's the case they didn't really succeed. Had this film a slightly bigger budget and a more serious attitude (like Walter Hill's fantastic, "The Warriors"), this could have been considered one of the best of the pessimistic, mankind-is-doomed-in-the-future movies, rather than just a very good b-movie.