Assault On Precinct 13
Director: Jean-Francois Richet
With: Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne
Runtime: 109 min
A general rule of cinema says that a film is only remade if the story needs improving. The fact that Jean-Francois Richet’s version of Assault on Precinct 13 is an unnecessary and uninspiring dirge to senseless violence, is an unflattering review of John Carpenter’s brilliant 1970’s original. It follows the blueprint for the typical modern action thriller: all bullets and no brains.
Sgt. Jake Roenick (Hawke), is a gritty “burnt out cop”, still traumatised by the memories of a sting gone wrong. He shelters behind his desk job in an insignificant area of Detroit, and masks his pain behind a cocktail of booze, pills and forced banter with his pallid, highly strung psychiatrist, a weakly disguised and poorly realised love interest. Roenich’s private pain is disturbed on New Year’s Eve when a police van transporting a group of misfit criminals including a sinister and velvet-voiced gangster (Fishburne) is forced to seek refuge from a vicious blizzard. The station is then surrounded and held to ransom by ruthless masked gunman with limitless firepower and an obsession for murder. The unlikely combination of mutually distrustful cops and robbers are then forced to cooperate in order to survive the siege.
Richet’s intention is that the ensuing claustrophobia should lead to scenes of high tension and edgy dialogue. Unfortunately, Assault on Precinct 13 is let down by its woefully inadequate script. The dialogue sags and droops as the action lurches from one random explosion of violence to another. This film wastes an eclectic and promising cast, whose characters remain one-dimensional stereotypes of every character from every combat movie ever made. Even the magnificent Fishburne is reduced to a mere silhouette. His Catholic cop-killing crimelord is criminally underdeveloped, and inspires little more than tepid apathy from the audience. Fishburne’s performance is still the best thing about this movie; he simmers with sophisticated menace and delicious malevolence - but it remains virtually impossible to feel any depth of emotion for him, or for any of the others for that matter. And therein lies the key flaw of Assault on Precinct 13: No matter how much it pretends to be Die Hard or any of the countless action thrillers which are its infinite superior, it fails to engage the audience. No-one cares if the besieged alliance survive the night. Make no mistake, this is a pointless film; a turgid testosterone fest which should soon be forgotten.
It’s another accepted law of cinema that remakes rarely enhance the legacy of their predecessors. However, you shouldn’t avoid Assault on Precinct 13 because it’s a remake: There are plenty of other reasons.
