Assault on Precinct 13

Remake Error                                                      
John Carpenter's Cult Classic Gets Slapped Around
By Cole Smithey

In attempting to modernize John Carpenter's 1976 cult-classic director Jean-Francois Richet opens with a showstopper sequence akin to the opening of Joe Carnahan's "Narc" before digressing into a disjointed quagmire of anachronistic plot elements. Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) is a distraught Detroit police Sergeant on duty at an obsolete police station (Precinct 13) on a blizzard-ravaged New Year's Eve when a stranded police bus full of prisoners fill the precinct's jail cells. Kingpin criminal Marion Bishop (Lawrence Fishburne) unwittingly attracts a siege on the precinct by a group of dirty undercover cops who want Marion's head at all costs lest he testify against them. It isn't long before Jake is forced to arm the prisoners to help defend the station house against a nightlong assault that claims a handful of surprise victims. "Assault On Precinct 13" will function as a passable roller coaster thriller for audiences not familiar with the original movie, but fails to resonate on the visceral level that Carpenter's film achieved.

John Carpenter originally used Howard Hawkes' classic 1959 western "Rio Bravo" as a stepping off point to create a new breed of urban suspense thriller. What Carpenter didn't do was attempt to remake "Rio Bravo" by moving it up 30 years. The problem with Hollywood's affinity for remaking films is that, as with "The Manchurian Candidate," there isn't enough narrative room to go in any direction without bumping into the predecessor's old furniture.

Audiences go to the cinema to be inspired, regardless of their chosen movie's genre. That inspiration can come from any direction of narrative substance, but it has to contain a certain degree of internal enlightenment to be fully satisfying. Abel Ferrara's "King Of New York" is a great example of a genre movie that squeezes an audience by their guts because the director sees so deeply inside the milieu he's representing onscreen that every detail adds momentum to the story.

The filmmakers here attempt to coast on the success of "Training Day" which paired Ethan Hawke with Denzel Washington in a glorious Los Angeles translation of Abel Ferrara's shining achievement "Bad Lieutenant" (1992). The shocking opening scene in "Assault" has a speeded-out Ethan Hawke spieling off a rapid-fire monologue to menacing drug dealers that he and his undercover partners have set up to sting. As suspicion over his frazzled antics escalates, so too does the violence that explodes in a chorus of gunfire and desperation. But, as we soon discover, the sequence is a disingenuous component to less contextualized action that follows.                                                                              

The action shifts to a year later when Jake pushes paper from a dead end desk job when he isn't trading barbs with his romantically inclined department-assigned therapist Alex (Maria Bello). The station's secretary Iris (Drea de Matteo) resembles a nymphomaniac ex-hooker with a penchant for sleeping with criminals and losers. So it's with a decidedly musky scent in the air that Jake and veteran cop Jasper "Old School" O'Shea (Brian Dennehy) settle in for their last New Year's Eve at the soon-to-be-closed station.

John Leguizamo serves as a junkie mascot for the group of prisoners who file into the precinct to wait out the snowstorm outside. Once the attack on the station house begins, the plot becomes something of a tennis match while we watch a dead ball of tension get smacked between the enormous outside forces, the freshly armed criminals inside, and their police officer teammates. Screenwriter James DeMonaco's proclivity for Mexican stand-offs reaches its saturation threshold as so many guns get pointed in characters' faces that all suspense is drained from the situation.

"Assault on Precinct 13" is a movie that tries to elaborately connect modern day police technology and methods to out-of-date aspects from John Carpenter's'70s era film. The result is that the audience is pulled from feeling like you're watching a blow-out episode of "Barney Miller" to watching a movie that wishes it were "Training Day."

If you can ignore the gaping holes of logic in "Assault" and mitigate the fact that this movie, much like the upcoming Bruce Willis vehicle "Hostage," is a generic action-thriller with no pretense of vision or social import then you'll get your money's worth of entertainment.

Rated R. 109 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)