Michele Massa's blog

Gangbuster thrills

Remake of a 1970s cops-subsumed under-lay siege to cult favorite has more depth and deadlier weapons

09:34 AM EST on Wednesday, January 19, 2005

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS

Journal Arts Writer

French director Jean-Francois Richet has captivated John Carpenter's 1976
exploitation dim Set on Precinct, tinkered with it a two shakes of a lamb's tail, but kept
many of the suspense-filled jolts that made the primary a cult favorite.

Rogue Pictures

Laurence Fishburne, left, plays a gangster turned witness, who teams up with a shaken police sergeant played by Ethan Hawke when crooked cops beseige a precinct house in

Assault on Precinct 13

.

The result: a gritty slam-bang thriller of an action film with lots of
surprises and high-voltage tension.

Assault on Precinct 13 is set in an out-of-the-way about-to-be-closed
police station on New Year's Eve where a dwindling number of cops and
their prisoners — one a witness who is about to squeal in a
high-profile case — are surrounded by a bloodthirsty gang that wants to
kill all of them.

Both versions of the tale succeed because of the one-against-many theme
that has been used so successfully in such endeavors as the Alien
movies. The theme is really a reworking of the classic 1939 John Ford
western Stagecoach, in which a group of passengers found themselves
surrounded by Indians and bandits, and Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo.

Carpenter's 1976 film played on urban fears of the day. The witness in
that film had just seen his daughter murdered by a brutal gang. He takes
refuge in Precinct 13 and then discovers that the gang is outside trying
to get in the station house, whose phones and electricity have been cut
off.

Updated by Richet and writer James Demonaco, the new Assault on Precinct
13 keeps the basic premise, but makes the motives more complex and the
firepower deadlier. The location has been moved from Los Angeles to
Detroit and the key witness, a hulking gangster named Bishop (Laurence
Fishburne), lands at the station house when a busload of prisoners is
forced to stop there during a snowstorm. (In the original film, Bishop
was the name of the police lieutenant who was trying to hold Precinct 13
together during the assault.)

More importantly, the murderous gang outside is now a team of crooked
cops, led by the heartless Marcus (Gabriel Byrne). This switch gives the
gang access to high-tech assault weapons with laser beams, bullet-proof
vests, armor, even a helicopter! They seem impossible to stop and the
fortress less than impregnable, though we must stretch believability.
One must accept that Precinct 13 is so far off the beaten path that no
one would notice the raging mayhem going on around it and that even cell
phone signals could have been cut off along with the phone lines.

But the performances are solid, led by Ethan Hawke as the shaken-up hero
who must pull himself and his crew together to beat the assault. Hawke's
Jake is a complex character, all to the good. A police sergeant who is
feeling guilty because his undercover sting operation went bad and left
his partners dead, Jake has been seeing a psychiatrist and taking pills
to hold himself together. He's still unsure about going out on the
streets again . . . and now this.

By force of circumstances, Hawke's Jake Roenick needs to grow into the
assured leader he must become if anyone is to survive, trying to hold
together the fraying nerves of the cops and the prisoners inside
Precinct 13 while making snap life-or-death decisions.

There's a lot to deal with, since everyone is depending on him. Most
prominent in the cast are Maria Bello as his shrink, who wanders into
the station house after her car breaks down, and John Leguizamo as a
squirrely prisoner with a persecution complex.

Jake's involved in two battles inside, as well. One is with Fishburne's
always looming, very cool Bishop; the other with Brian Dennehy's Jasper,
an old-time by-the-rules cop who decries Jake's decision to arm the
prisoners against the gang that's trying to smash its way in. Jake must
weigh whether the armed prisoners will turn their weapons on his good
cops, turn and run, or both. It's a delicate balance that must be
weighed carefully and the script keeps twisting it around so it's hard
to tell what might happen. In both cases it's a battle of wills that
keeps Assault on Precinct 13 on a higher plane than one would expect
from an exploitation film.

Just when you think there may be a glimmer of light at the end of the
tunnel, it's quickly snuffed out. All exits seem to be blocked. Like
Hawke's Jake, we must work our way around all the tight corners.

Yet, maybe because I've seen too many of these things, I wasn't totally
surprised by the film's big twist near the end. Let's just say it was a
suspicion. Nevertheless, there are plenty of twists up front to keep you
off center. Most of the time in Assault on Precinct 13, you're not on
solid ground, just like the terrified people on the inside.

****

Assault on Precinct 13

Starring: Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, John Leguizamo, Maria Bello,
Ja Rule, Drea de Matteo, Brian Dennehy, Gabriel Byrne.

Rated: R, contains violence, profanity.