Kurt Russell wears an unidentified watch

Snake Plissken holds a scoped revolver on "Map to the Stars" Eddie, and strapped to the wrist of his free arm is a thick slab of black plastic. This is Escape from L.A., John Carpenter's 1996 sequel to Escape from New York, with Kurt Russell back as Snake, the one-eyed convict the government pulls out of a cell whenever it needs a dead man for a job no soldier can be sent to do. Eddie, played by Steve Buscemi, is a swindler who sells tours of the ruined city. A 2000 earthquake has cut Los Angeles off from the mainland, and the government now runs the island as the place it deports everyone it has condemned. The President's daughter has defected over the wall with the remote for a satellite weapon that can switch off every machine on the planet, and handed it to the warlord who holds the city. Snake goes in to take it back.

The slab on Snake's wrist is not a watch anyone can buy. It is a prop, built for the film, and the concept art that designer Fireball Tim Lawrence drew for it carries no brand, only the words "Snake Watch." It descends from the unit Russell wore in Escape from New York in 1981, the countdown clock that tracked the hours until the charges wired into Snake's neck would fire. The sequel keeps the idea and rolls a countdown timer, a homing device, and a compass into one black case. What it counts this time is Snake himself: the government has injected him with a virus it calls Plutoxin 7 and told him it will kill him in about ten hours unless he finishes the job and takes the antidote.

That countdown is the only thing holding Snake to the mission, and the film's ending takes it apart. Plutoxin 7 turns out to be a hard strain of influenza, engineered to scare him and built to wear off within hours, with no power to kill anyone. The deadline was a leash the government invented to be sure he came back with the trigger. The one part of the prop that drives the entire plot, the number falling toward zero, was timing a death that was never coming.