January 19, 2005 | It is a dark and snowy night. New Year’s Eve, to be precise. At Precinct 13, a gone-to-seed police station in the wilds of Detroit, Sgt. Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) is going through the motions of holding down the fort. Tomorrow morning, the station will officially close. Until then, Roenick expects to kill time with a grizzled fellow cop (Brian Dennehy) and a cheerfully vulgar secretary (Drea de Matteo) during a strictly pro forma graveyard shift.
Because of the raging snowstorm, however, a police bus transporting prisoners must take an unscheduled stop at Precinct 13. Roenick begrudgingly agrees to temporarily incarcerate the passengers: Beck (John Leguizamo), a loquacious junkie; Smiley (rapper-actor Jeffrey “Ja Rule” Atkins), a shifty dealer in counterfeit merchandise; Anna (Aisha Hinds), an alleged gang-banger; and, most important, Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne), a taciturn gangster who recently killed a treacherous business partner.
Unfortunately, that late, unlamented business partner was an undercover cop. Even more unfortunately, the cop’s equally crooked partners, led by the implacable Marcus Duvall (Gabriel Byrne), are heavily armed and grimly determined to attack Precinct 13, extinguish Bishop – and, while they’re at it, murder all inconvenient witnesses. Outnumbered and outgunned, with no electricity and dwindling resources, Roenick is forced to arm the prisoners – and a meddlesome psychiatrist (Maria Bello) who’s inconveniently on the premises — while leading a desperate defense against wave after wave of gun-toting invaders who…
Hey, wait a minute! Haven’t we seen this someplace before?
Yes, you guessed it: Assault on Precinct 13, the film that details Roenick’s dusk-to-dawn misadventure, is yet another remake. Specifically, it’s an updated retread of a well-regarded and highly influential 1976 B-movie that was directed, written and scored by a pre-Halloween John Carpenter. Appropriately enough for a remake of a ’70s cult-fave action-thriller, the new AP13 comes off as a purposefully retro slam-bang melodrama that takes an explicitly old-school approach to kicking ass, drawing blood and taking lives. And that’s a good thing: In an era when genre flicks of this sort increasingly resemble video games, music videos or glossy commercials, the blunt, brawny simplicity of director Jean-Francois Richet’s storytelling style seems positively novel, if not downright subversive.
The ’76 version was itself a kinda-sorta remake, in that it recycled plot elements from Rio Bravo (and, obliquely, other Howard Hawks classics) and stylistic tropes from Night of the Living Dead. Carpenter’s AP13 focused on cops and convicts forced to join forces inside a shuttered L.A. police station while besieged by a bloodthirsty street gang. For the remake, screenwriter James DeMonaco retains much of original premise, but recasts the invading hordes as crooked cops. I’ll leave it to more politically oriented commentators to decide whether the change says something about contemporary ambivalence toward authority figures, or something else about shameless pandering to inner-city ticketbuyers.
Much like Carpenter’s original, Richet’s remake takes a good half-hour to establish the particulars of its high-concept premise. In the jittery prologue – a self-conscious collage of jump cuts, desaturated colors and hand-held camerawork – we meet Roenick during an ill-fated undercover sting that has fatal consequences for his two partners. Flash forward eight months, and Roenick reappears as a guilt-wracked wreck who swills booze and pops pain pills while marking time at his Precinct 13 desk job.
The good news is, the hard-luck cop gets a shot at redemption. The better news is, Richet brings it down several notches after a show-offy prologue. Indeed, the movie benefits greatly from his no-frills staging and editing of action set pieces: Assaults and interactions are all the more effective because spatial relationships are cleanly defined. (One unfortunate exception to the geographical specificity: A forest inexplicably appears behind the police station fairly late in the game.)
Nothing in the new AP13 is nearly as shocking as the near-legendary scene in the ’76 original where Carpenter blithely broke a cardinal rule of the action-movie genre – Thou Shalt Not Actually Kill An Endangered Child – while drawing disparate characters to isolated police station. But Richet does fine job of building suspense and establishing characters during early going, laying groundwork for the protracted siege that grips the audience for the rest of the picture.
Richet and DeMonaco make relatively few adjustments to modernize Carpenter’s scenario. (There’s some throwaway dialogue to “explain” why folks inside Precinct 13 can’t use cell phones to summon help, but this seems at best a perfunctory gesture.) Better still, the filmmakers remain scrupulously faithful to their material’s B-movie roots, even to the point of springing nasty surprises while doling out death sentences to key characters.
The performances are sturdy and straightforward across the board, as irony-free as the movie itself. Fishburne and Byrne bring effortless authority to their roles, while Hawke hits all the right notes as he charts various steps – mocking humor, pained guilt, fearful indecision, steely resolve – in Roenick’s character arc. Among supporting players, de Matteo is standout as brassy slattern with a weakness for bad boys but impressive reserves of inner strength.
Call it meat-and-potatoes moviemaking if you like. But Assault on Precinct 13 is sufficiently tasty to satisfy anyone hungry for an old-fashioned rock-the-house action flick.
