Assault on Precinct 13 (Special Edition)

Ostensibly a remake of John Carpenter's cult favourite, the new and improved Assault on Precinct 13 acknowledges its debt to Rio Bravo early on with a couple of lazy Dean Martin Christmas jingles.


Martin was a deputy drunk in Howard Hawks's 1959 western classic, which is where Carpenter borrowed the plot for his 1976 cop drama. Hatchet-faced tough guy John Wayne played a bossy sheriff in the original; in that film, Dino and Duke keep a passel of bad guys from breaking into jail and grabbing their prisoner.


Same story here, except this time out we're in a condemned Detroit precinct on New Year's Eve, and the prisoner is a drug lord played by the lethally cool Laurence Fishburne.


The film's real departure, and gamble, is that Ethan Hawke, dweeb aesthete from Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, is now playing the Duke's and Dino's cop characters. Hawke's Sergeant Jake Roenick is both drug addict and precinct boss. That's a lot of character acting for a perpetual juvenile 25 pounds shy of either Cagney or Lacey.


Screenwriters Carpenter (he'll be redoing films at 100) and James DeMonaco wisely get us used to Ethan as a tear-away action adventurer in a ferocious pre-credit drug sting. Sgt. Jake throws himself around with nervous athleticism. Nevertheless, two fellow officers go down. And Jake catches one in the pin. Then, suddenly -- quick cut -- we resume action eight months later. Our limping hero is now a wisecracking junkie (Scotch and Seconal), trying to forget about A Time When He Cared.


Making matters worse, the force shrink (Maria Bello) shows up New Year's Eve, wanting to know why Jake is still hiding behind a desk in a soon-to-be abandoned precinct. Everybody else is long gone, except for a party-girl secretary (Drea De Matteo) and an aging cop, "Old School" O'Shea (Brian Dennehy).


Elsewhere, a mobster with a dangerous secret (Fishburne) is on his way to jail. Someone's trailing the van. Just as the expedition nears Jake's station, snow turns to ice and the cop car skids out of control. Driving is impossible. Detroit has been shut down. The van and its captives will have to hole up at Precinct 13 for the night.


One of this enlightened B-movie's many pleasures is French director Jean-François Richet's handling of atmosphere and setting. Shot almost entirely at night in a blinding snowstorm, the crime drama is an intriguing remodelling of a classic film noir. It's a black and white movie by function of climate and time of day, with vivid stabs of colour -- a spreading stain of blood in the snow, Bello's flashing gold hair and Jake's frightened blue-green eyes.


Richet also knows how to shoot action scenes. And his screenwriters scatter just enough bits of business and tough-guy patter around. Fishburne does a newspaper crossword puzzle for the first half of the film. And at one point a prisoner mocks a junkie inmate who, like Jake, is going through withdrawal by snarling that he's "sweating more than Mike Tyson at a spelling bee."


Another plus -- the supporting cast has been shrewdly chosen. Ja Rule and John Leguizamo score as petty criminals locked up with Fishburne. Gabriel Byrne, who decorated the crime classics Miller's Crossing and The Usual Suspects, is walking the beat. And it's good to see Drea de Matteo working her eyebrows and hips again after getting bada-binged on The Sopranos.


The film is not without fault. Hawke only holds his own as an action hero. And Maria Bello overplays a badly conceived character. Most of all, the film needs another player as potent as Fishburne.


Still, Assault on Precinct 13 is a smartly assembled noir package. Canadians in particular might find it perversely satisfying to watch somebody else curse and fight their way through a deadly winter storm. Conrad Alton, Filmbay Editor.

Warning : this review will have spoilers.

I saw this for the first time (and last - I can't watch the ice cream sceen again) last night. Ok movie, but I felt like I was watching a remake of "Night of the Living Dead" more than a gang movie. The way the gang members silently walked about outside and just mindlessly rushed the building later despite getting shot so easily, they seemed more like zombies. Granted, zombies with silencer equipted weaponry, but members of the mindless undead just the same.

As for the confrontation between the father and the gang members who killed his daughter, I found that very unconvincing. I think it would have been much more believable had he not found the gun in the ice cream truck but instead just rammed the gang members' car off the road with his own and than beat them to death with a tire iron (would have been more emotionally satisfying as well). It would also explain why he did not get into his car and drive away (which is something I did not understand).

For me it isn't quite a four star film, but its nearer to that than 3 stars. Effectively its a remake of Rio Bravo, restaged in contemporary Los Angeles. For those not familiar with Rio Bravo, a Sheriff and some friends are holed up in his office fighting off an attacking gang.

There are reasons to criticise it. Some of the acting is really awful and nothing can ever hide that. However its directed by John Carpenter at a time when he only made good and sometimes all-time classic movies (Halloween followed this two years later). The pacing, camera-work and action are all first class. Carpenter also contributed the original music. This is one of his very best pieces of music, very sinister, and I'm sure that it contributes a lot to the overall atmosphere of the film.

My view is that its a flawed classic, that you'll either love or hate. The fact that they bothered to remake it three years ago indicates that it must have had some good qualities. Watch it and find out!

Just watched this for the first time since the late 70's. I must say the movie still holds up. It is a low budget flick but it is done really well and for what it is it is pretty damn good and entertaining still. And I must say it beats out the slick hollywood remake by a mile.

"Driven by random violence, chance and fate" as Carpenter put it on the commentary track, it's easy to see his breakthrough feature (in the UK at least: it tanked Stateside) as a reaction against the cynicism of both the times ("There are no heroes anymore, only men who follow orders," says a voice over Austin Stoker's police radio) and its style of film-making. Carpenter's films often take place in a wasteland or an abandoned environment - Escape From New York, The Thing, They Live - but that is more of a narrative device to highlight his characters' self-reliance and increase the odds against them than a springboard for social criticism.

Always at his best with a low budget that forced him to rely on his intuitive sense of the cinematic to overcome, Carpenter in his prime was a visceral director with a knack for updating classic genres with wit, imagination and style (not to be confused with the modern equivalent, which had more to do with slick cinematography and snappy editing). Here he gives all the trimmings of urban paranoia, particularly potent in a decade (the seventies) increasingly aware of growing alienation from and loss of community, with an old-fashioned tale of reluctant heroes doing what they've got to do complete with macho Hawksian dialogue and a classical film-making style.

Sure, it's Rio Bravo set in seventies LA (the working title was The Anderson Alamo) boasting possibly the first politically correct urban villains in the shape of its inter-racial gang who take on a half-shutdown police station, but that's no bad thing when half of Hollywood was imitating Serpico or The Exorcist (remember when William Friedkin was the most influential and emulated director in the business?).

Austin Stoker gives the film a sense of gravity with his soft-spoken authority as the cop on his first night out, Laurie Zimmer does a good Lauren Bacall that could have been even better if Carpenter had been able to shoot a few more set-ups and have a bit more latitude in the editing, but the undisputed star of the show is Darwin Joston's Napoleon Wilson. A Hawksian hero in the Mitchum mold, he doesn't have as much dialogue as the other players, but what he has is choice ("He fell over," says a prison warder after kicking him out of his stool. "Yeah, I don't sit down as well as I used to."). His personality dominates the movie so much that you wonder why, a brief cameo as 'Dr Phibes' in The Fog aside, he never went on to better things.

Pitched as a blaxploitation flick in the US to miserable box-office but a surprise smash hit in the UK (enough so to drum up the budget for Halloween), a few former aficionados of the film have expressed disillusionment with it after seeing the widescreen DVD, and it's possible to see why. Oddly enough, the Scope frame probably slows it down on the small screen since the panning and scanning cuts from one side to the other on TV broadcasts break up the long takes and create a different rhythm and pace. Still, in Image's 2.35:1 widescreen transfer the film probably looks better than it did on its first release - after a decade-and-a-half of dupey prints, it's quite a shock to see a sharp print. And there's a great selection of extras too: an occassionally illuminating audio commentary with a few of the dead patches common to Carpenter's commentaries, a Q&A session with Carpenter and Stoker, a heavily scratched theatrical trailer, 2 radio spotsand photo gallery. There's also an isolated score track for Carpenter's classic synth score, for the most part a marvel of musical economy (one theme is inspired by Jerry Goldsmith's Rio Lobo) with a really great main theme.

If you can remember that brief moment when Carpenter was the most interesting new director on the block - it was no coincidence that he shared magazine covers with Steven Spielberg back in 1978 - chances are you'll still find much to enjoy in this archetypal late-night movie. Maybe fond memory patches up some of the film's rough spots, but hey, isn't that what nostalgia's for?