Assault on Precinct 13
New Line Cinema
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Gabriel Byrne, Maria Bello, Brian Dennehey and Laurence Fishburne
The Verdict: After big start, “Assault” snowballs into a ridiculous remake that never should have been made.
Movie: 2 1/1 stars
French director Jean-Francois Richet’s remake of John Carpenter’s ’70s thriller “Assault on Precinct 13” begins with a bang as Ethan Hawke’s undercover cop Jake Roenick endures a particularly bad day on the job. Twitchy and ranting about taking a “subconscious safari,” Roenick sweats his way through the role of junkie/dealer in a high-stakes drug bust that eventually goes fatally wrong. The op is bungled, two of Roenick’s partners are dead, and Jake is left with a heavy conscience and lots of blood on his hands.
Fast forward to New Year’s Eve, several months later. Jake’s been more or less demoted to a desk job at Precinct 13, a decaying station house about to shut its doors forever when the clock strikes midnight. He spends his days popping pills and alcohol chasers, sparring and fumblingly flirting with the departmental psychiatrist (Maria Bello).
It’s an especially bleak, snowy New Year’s in Detroit. As near-blizzard conditions pelt the roads outside, Roenick and his co-workers, a craggy old-timer moments away from pension (Brian Dennehy) and a sexpot secretary (Drea de Matteo) who likes sleeping with “bad boys,” shut the doors, spike the punch and crank up the Dean Martin records.
Too bad so many unwanted guests keep crashing their party.
First up, it’s a handful of crooks and two cops in transit to lock-up who get re-routed to Precinct 13 when the snow gets its heaviest. The motley crew includes a wild-eyed, conspiracy-minded addict (John Leguizamo), a brooding female thug-in-training (Aisha Hinds), a slick counterfeiter (Ja Rule) named Smiley who constantly refers to himself in the third person, and, the pick of the litter, crime boss Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne), arrested the same day for gunning down a cop in the middle of a crowded afternoon mass.
Things only snowball downhill from there. Suddenly, Precinct 13 is invaded by gunmen in white ski masks, the phone lines go silent, and the power gets cut. Turns out Bishop ran afoul of some dirty cops, led by the icy Marcus Duvall (Gabriel Byrne in full-on dispassionate villain mode), and they want the kingpin dead so he can’t finger them in court. Outside the building, there’s a legion of snipers with laser sights itching to pull the trigger. Inside, everyone’s trapped with only a roomful of seized weaponry and each other to look to for help.
It’s a classic set-up that still works as well as it did in the westerns of days gone by, this time substituting cowboys and Indians for cops and robbers and a trusty fort for a run-down police station. There’s the begrudging hero, the damsels in distress, the rogues gallery of supporting players, the villain in ally’s clothing and a wounded man whose time is running out. All “Assault on Precinct 13” need do to be successful is let these broad-stroke conflicts unfold as they must, with liberty and popcorn for all.
The film’s greatest triumph and failure both lie in the fact that the screenplay, adapted from Carpenter’s original by James DeMonaco, is unwilling to let things play out as predictably as they might.
This film keeps throwing violent surprises at you, one ruthlessly after the other. Richet ups the tension by shooting his thriller with a detached, immediate eye. When bad things happen, they’re presented in a real-time, no-nonsense style that can momentarily leave you breathless. A hidden gunman, an icicle though the eye, deaths as grisly as they are sudden. In this film a moment of pause gets a bad guy skewered with a blade and beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat-that’s just the way it is.
There’s boldness in the way De Monaco and Richet dispatch main characters before their times, when it’s not expected by even the most smugly astute member of the audience. It’s also a sincere credit to the performers that there’s a real sense of loss when any of the characters are taken out of the picture.
Bello, for instance, has a nice arc from collected caregiver to scrambling wreck, which the actress pulls off with characteristic grace and insight. Also good are Ja Rule and Leguizamo, in character roles written and performed with just enough flavor to make them register strongly with only a little amount of screen time.
And Fishburne is stronger here than he’s been since the first “Matrix” film, oozing killer charm and calculating intelligence whether he’s filling out a crossword or lighting up an intruder with a Molotov cocktail. He doesn’t even need lines to get his points across; it’s all in his squared shoulders and his burning eyes.
There’s not a lot of stretching to be seen here, but everyone fits their stereotypes snugly save for Hawke, who looks a little lost in the role of the hard-nosed antihero. The actor knows his way around an incendiary cop opera (see his Academy-nommed work in “Training Day” for corroboration), but he’s more credible as a talky intellectual than as an action star.
The problem with the film’s unpredictable character exterminations is that they don’t allow for much build-up in group conflicts between the characters, a touch that could’ve easily been this picture’s strongest suit. There are a lot of intriguing relationships that get short shifted here, from the way Hawke and Fishburne flip-flop from adversaries to allies and back again to the interesting role reversal between Jake and his suddenly frantic psychiatrist. When the character configuration changes every 10 minutes or so, there’s little follow-through on interpersonal dynamics.
Still, the film looks great, all blacks, blues, and murky grays, and it’s fun while it lasts. DeMonaco squeezes in some nice character tics (Leguizamo and Hawke momentarily bond over their respective drug joneses), zingers (most memorable for this critic was the observation that someone was sweating “like Mike Tyson in a spelling bee”), and juicy double-crosses galore, and Richet understands that it’s fun to someone wield an ax but it’s even more fun to watch someone go to town with a dusty Tommy gun.
The script even shoehorns in a few valuable life lessons for Jake and the cynical Detroit cop in all of us, such as how to meet your last stand with dignity, the difference between the phrases “I want to live” and “I don’t want to die,” and the significance of the notion that a criminal on the right side of a fight is still a criminal.
Sure, the plot is full of holes (How DOES Duvall arrange his operation so tightly in only a few hours? Why IS there an inexplicable forest outside the inner-city precinct that only seems to show up for the benefit of an extended night-vision chase near film’s end?), but this isn’t a film to be thought about or analyzed.
“Assault on Precinct 13,” for better and worse, is what it is-an energetic, completely disposable hardass shoot-em-up that only wants to blow stuff up real good and usually does. It’s a wholly unnecessary remake that nevertheless almost crosses the finish line under its own head of steam.