Assault on Precinct 13

Under Siege
by Ed Owens

In 1976, John Carpenter followed up his cult student film Dark Star with Assault on Precinct 13, an urban reimagining of Howard Hawks' slow-burn western Rio Bravo filtered through Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Nearly thirty years later, Carpenter's classic gets studio funding, a bigger cast, and a glossier finish in the form of Jean-Francois Richet's remake, a slickly produced actioner that only proves that, in this case, less is more.

Assault on Precinct 13 has one of the most compelling opening sequences since Narc (and, not surprisingly, begs the comparison with its own liberally borrowed and heavily contrived setup): young undercover cop Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) loses two partners and gets badly wounded when a drug deal goes bad. Months later, he's a desk jockey at a police station on the outskirts of Detroit due to be closed on New Year's Day, spending his New Year's Eve at the station with a sex-obsessed secretary (Drea de Matteo, sporting a short skirt and fishnets despite it being the middle of winter), a neurotic therapist (Maria Bello), and a seasoned cop on the verge of retirement (Brian Dennehy). When a bus carrying infamous gangster and notorious copkiller Marion Bishop (a stoic Laurence Fishburne) and a handful of other criminals (including John Leguizamo as a fast-talking paranoid junkie and Ja Rule as a small-time crook who constantly talks about himself in the third person) gets diverted to the station by a winter storm, Roenick and his motley crue find themselves in the middle of a violent standoff against a group of well-equipped corrupt cops led by the coldly calculating Marcus Duvall (Gabriel Byrne).

Implausibilities pile up faster than bodies (while the violence is often brutal, the filmmakers have thankfully excised the notorious shooting of a little girl from the original), some resulting from the changes made to Carpenter's original narrative. The film attempts to address some of its narrative gaps directly (the cops laying siege to the station are capable of blocking radios and cellphones), but, in doing so, frequently creates more problems than it resolves (would they not also be capable of simply leveling the building?). The usual clichés all make an appearance (highly trained snipers show remarkable precision when firing on secondary characters, but apparently shoot at major characters with their eyes closed; villains give lengthy speeches when they should be shooting), and what should have been a breakneck pace throughout occasionally grinds to a halt for character development, most of which is insultingly derivative and all of which is irrelevant to the plot.

Richet and cinematographer Robert Gantz shoot the proceedings with lots of slant angles and slick effects (including the overused “scope” view), giving the film a polished look antithetical to Carpenter's original down and dirty style (no doubt the result of a low budget and the guerrilla film techniques that Carpenter employed at the time). But no amount of high sheen can hide the fact that Assault on Precinct 13, like last year's Alfie, is ultimately a thoughtless update, a narrative revision that can't be bothered to actually stop and consider the impact such changes have on the rest of the film. The transition from loosely organized gang members to a crack team of rogue cops is not without socio-political implications which the film chooses to blithely ignore (while Carpenter chooses to avoid the deeper subtexts, he frequently touches on them in throwaway lines or scenes).

Hawke is electrifying in the opening sequence, making the rest of his performance seem dull by comparison, while Fishburne, coming off of his Matrix role as Morpheus, phones it in, showing little of the charisma of his predecessor (Darwin Josten as the wry and wily Napoleon Wilson). Other than Byrne, who sleepwalks through what little screen time he actually has, the rest of the cast is barely worth mentioning, as they serve as little more than fodder for the film's tedious game of “Guess who dies next?”

The film's few brushes with greatness (such as an intense Mexican standoff initiated by Dennehy, or Leguizamo's paranoid questioning of a late arrival at gunpoint) only serve to underscore the rest of the film's failure to live up to its potential, much less the potential of the material (Carpenter's film is much tighter, despite its limitations). With a little more thought, Richet and company could have taken Carpenter's original in interesting new directions. As it is, Assault on Precinct 13 is all dressed up, but doesn't go anywhere.