Bob Hauk: You going to kill me, Snake?
Snake Plissken: Not now, I'm too tired.
[pause]
Snake Plissken: Maybe later.
Bob Hauk: You go in, find the President, bring him out in 24 hours, and you're a free man.
Snake Plissken: 24 hours, huh?
Bob Hauk: I'm making you an offer.
Snake Plissken: Bullshit!
Bob Hauk: Straight just like I said.
Snake Plissken: I'll think about it.
Bob Hauk: No time. Give me an answer.
Snake Plissken: Get a new president!
Bob Hauk: We're still at war, Plissken. We need him alive.
Snake Plissken: I don't give a fuck about your war... or your president.
Bob Hauk: Is that your answer?
Snake Plissken: I'm
thinking about it.
Bob Hauk: Think hard.
Snake Plissken: [pause] Why me?
Bob Hauk: You flew the Gullfire over Leningrad. You know how to get in quiet. You're all I got.
Snake Plissken: [pause] I guess I go in one way or the other... doesn't mean shit to me. All right... I'll do it. Give me the pardon
paper.
Bob Hauk: When you come out.
Snake Plissken: Before.
Bob Hauk: I told you I wasn't a fool, Plissken.
Snake Plissken: Call me Snake.
Stewardess: [Air Force One has been hijacked by a lone terrorist] Tell this to the workers when they ask where their leader went. We, the soldiers of The National Liberation Front of America, in the name of the workers and all the oppressed of this imperialist country, have struck a fatal blow to the fascist police state. What better revolutionary example than to let their
president perish in the inhuman dungeon of his own imperialist prison.
Bob Hauk: It's the survival of the human race, Plissken. Something you don't give a shit about.
Bob Hauk: In 22 hours, the Hartford Summit Meeting will be over. China and the Soviet Union will go back home. Now, the President was on his way to the summit when his plane went down. He has a briefcase attached to his wrist. The tape recording inside has to reach Hartford in 22 hours.
Snake Plissken: What's on it?
Bob Hauk: You
know anything about nuclear fusion?
Snake Plissken: No.
Bob Hauk: The survival of the human race, Plissken. Something you don't give a shit about.
Cronenberg: [Cronenberg approaches Snake with two injection guns] I'm going to inject you. It will sting for a second.
[Cronenberg places both guns on the side of Snake's
neck and injects him, producing a loud bang]
Bob Hauk: That's it, Plissken.
Cronenberg: Tell him.
Snake Plissken: Tell me what?
Bob Hauk: That idea you had about turning the Gullfire around 180 degrees and flying off to Canada.
Snake Plissken: What did you do to me, asshole?
Bob Hauk: My idea, Plissken. Something we've been fooling around with. Two microscopic capsules lodged in your arteries. They're already starting to dissolve. In 22 hours, the cores will completely dissolve. Inside the cores are a heat-sensing charge. Not a large explosion, about the size of a pinhead, just big enough to open up both of your arteries. I'd say you'd be dead in
10-15 seconds...
Snake Plissken: [chokes Hauk] Take them out, now!
Cronenberg: They're protected by the cores. Fifteen minutes before the last hour is up, we can neutralize the charge with X-rays.
[Pushes Snake away from Hauk]
Bob Hauk: We'll burn out the charges IF you have the President.
Snake
Plissken: What if I'm a little late?
Bob Hauk: No more Hartford Summit. And no more Snake Plissken.
Snake Plissken: When I get back, I'm going to kill you.
Bob Hauk: The Gullfire's waiting.
[first lines]
Narrator: In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent. The once great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison for the entire country. A fifty-foot containment wall is erected along the New Jersey shoreline, across the Harlem River, and down along the Brooklyn shoreline. It completely surrounds Manhattan Island. All
bridges and waterways are mined. The United States Police Force, like an army, is encamped around the island. There are no guards inside the prison, only prisoners and the worlds they have made. The rules are simple: once you go in, you don't come out.
[last lines]
President: Good evening. Although I shall not be present at this historic summit meeting, I present this in the hope that our great nations may learn to live in peace...
[He plays a cassette, believing it to be the correct one about nuclear fusion. His smile drops when it instead plays "Bandstand Boogie"]
Romero: You touch me... he dies. If you're not in the air in thirty seconds... he dies. You come back in... he dies.
Romero: [Romero takes a package out of his shirt and unwraps it to reveal the President's middle finger, complete with ring] Twenty seconds.
Hauk: I'm ready to talk.
Romero: Nineteen. Eighteen.
Hauk: What do you want?
Romero: Seventeen. Sixteen.
Hauk: [to his soldiers] Let's go. Let's go!
Bob Hauk: [reading Plissken's file] S.D. Plissken... American, Lieutenant: Special Forces Unit "Black Light". Two Purple Hearts, Leningrad and Siberia. Youngest man to be decorated by the President. Then you robbed the Federal Reserve Depository... life sentence, New York maximum security penitentary. I'm about to kick your ass out of *the world*, war hero...
Snake
Plissken: [calmly strikes a match against Hauk's desk to light his cigarette and in a bored tone of voice] Who're you?
Bob Hauk: Hauk, Police Commissioner.
Snake Plissken: Bob Hauk...
Bob Hauk: Special Forces Unit "Texas Thunder"... we heard of you too, Plissken.
Cabbie: Brain? Brain, I brought somebody to see you.
Snake Plissken: [recognizes Brain] Harold Helman...
Brain: Snake?
Maggie: [curious] Harold?
Snake Plissken: How you been, Harold? It's been a long time.
Maggie: You never told me you knew Snake Plissken, Brain.
Cabbie: Isn't that great? Hey, Brain, I could use some gas if you could spare some.
Snake Plissken: I'm glad you remember me. Yeah, a man should remember his past. Kansas City, four years ago, you ran out on me... You left me sittin' there.
Brain: You were late.
Snake Plissken: [bitterly] We were
buddies, Harold. You, me, and Fresno Bob. You know what they did to Bob, huh?
Snake Plissken: [radioing a pullout request] All right, get your machine ready, I'm coming out.
Bob Hauk: 18 hours left, Plissken!
Snake Plissken: Listen to me, Hauk. The President is dead, you got that? Somebody's had him for dinner!
Bob Hauk: Plissken, if you get back in that glider and fly back here without
the tape or the President, I'll shoot you down myself! You try to climb out, I'll burn you off the wall! Do you understand that, Plissken?
Snake Plissken: [beat] A little human compassion.
Snake Plissken: Where's the President?
Cabbie: The Duke got him. Everybody knows the Duke's got him. You don't have to put a gun to my head. I'll tell you.
Snake Plissken: Who's the Duke?
Cabbie: The Duke? The Duke of New York, A-Number-1, the Big Man, that's who!
Snake Plissken: I
wanna meet this Duke.
Cabbie: You can't meet the Duke! Are you crazy? Nobody gets to meet the Duke. You meet him once and then you're dead!