Release Date: January 19, 2005
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Gabriel Byrne, Maria Bello, Drea de Matteo, Brian Dennehy, Ja Rule, John Leguizamo
Directed by: Jean-François Richet
Written by: James DeMonaco
Distributed by: Rogue Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (strong violence and language throughout, some drug content)
Assault on Precinct 13, the loose remake of the John Carpenter actioner from 1976 (by way of Die Hard), is a familiar, unremarkable shoot-em-up: low on tension, suspense, and plot, and high on bullets, clichés, and one-liners. If you buy into its absurd scenario -- a bunch of crooked Detroit cops lay siege to a nearly-abandoned police precinct in hopes of killing a gangster being held there -- it is a mildly entertaining way to spend the better part of two hours. But it is by no means transcendent; mostly, it seems designed to make a quick buck by casting today’s stars in a dated cult favorite.
Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, and Gabriel Byrne are the stars, with a handful of recognizable character actors as backup. Hawke plays Sgt. Jake Roenick, a once-great cop who has been behind a desk since he was shot and several of his colleagues were killed in an undercover drug operation he was part of; his current assignment is to close down the crumbling Precinct 13 on New Year’s Eve. Outside, a blizzard rages, and inside, it’s just Roenick, an old patrolman named Jasper (Brian Dennehy), a secretary named Iris (Drea de Matteo), and a police psychiatrist named Alex (Maria Bello).
Things change when a prison bus carrying four criminals, including the notorious gangster and cop-killer Marion Bishop (Fishburne), is diverted to Precinct 13 to wait out the storm. Roenick, nonplussed, decides to lock the prisoners up in the precinct’s holding cells, which sets the stage for the following shoot-out: A high-ranking detective, Marcus Duvall (Byrne), leads a team of elite police officers in a series of increasingly audacious attacks on the precinct, intending to kill Bishop, while Roenick, unsure of the specifics, nevertheless decides to risk his life defending the station and the criminals inside.
What little intrigue or mystery there is to Roenick’s situation -- it’s not immediately clear why police officers are storming the precinct, although those who’ve seen the trailers and advertisements will know that Duvall and his cronies are corrupt, which, in the movies, is often reason enough -- evaporates quickly once the shooting starts. The way the characters paint their surroundings with lead (this being one of those “high octane” action movies, ever firearm has a naturally limitless supply of ammunition), you get the impression that everyone with a gun is trying to obliterate the movie’s sense of narrative rather than hit any definite targets. This isn’t a story, it’s a shoot-out; if not for (or perhaps despite) the R rating, this would be a perfect movie for an undemanding, inattentive audience of teenage guys.
The story fragments that do survive the shooting-gallery effect quickly disintegrate under scrutiny -- dated though the 1976 version may now seem, the 70’s actually provided some of the elements necessary to make the story work. Surrounded and trapped in the precinct, Roenick and the others discover they cannot call for help because their cell phones and radios have been jammed -- Duvall and the bad guys have sophisticated electronic-interference technology. This, along with the night-vision goggles, high-powered assault rifles, concussion grenades, and an endless supply of elite foot soldiers makes it seem as though Duvall is leading a platoon of Navy Seals rather than Detroit cops. And since his initial plan was to send in two officers to surreptitiously put a single bullet in Bishop’s head, it’s never even made clear where or how he came up with all the extra men and firepower on short notice, especially on New Year’s Eve.
But the logic of the movie, as understood by the director, Jean-François Richet, and his scenarist, James DeMonaco, is that answering these questions would use up precious minutes that could better be used for shoot-outs; the movie is just over an hour and a half long and seems designed to improve on Carpenter’s self-critique that he took too long to getting to the action in the earlier film. The tension of anticipatory suspense, however, is an invaluable commodity, even in mindless shoot-outs -- it is, in fact, precisely what makes Die Hard the transcendent film of this genre: The cat-and-mouse maneuverings between the Bruce Willis character and the German terrorists in the early stages of that movie are what make the later shoot-outs worthwhile. Precinct 13, though, is an impatient film, eager to get on with the shooting. A bullet fired now is just as good as a bullet fired later, it says.
Perhaps, except if you find yourself wondering why, when a handful of the “good” characters are killed midway through the movie, you feel almost nothing, this is the reason. Developed in fits and starts between shoot-outs -- almost every characterization scene seems to end with a character shouting, in a hissed whisper, “Someone’s coming!” -- neither the police officers nor the prisoners ever rise above the level of stereotype: John Leguizamo and Ja Rule play two walking misdemeanors who crack wise about cops and white people; de Matteo lays her “Sopranos”-perfected layer of sleaze on her fishnet-stockinged, sexpot secretary.
Only Hawke, Fishburne, and, to a lesser degree, Byrne make any impact, and together they carry the film. Hawke has a great first scene, in which he poses, undercover, as a drug dealer and delivers a rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness monologue that sounds sort of like he’s reading the script to Before Sunrise on methamphetamines. Reliably bloodshot and scruffy-haired, he does well as Roenick, although you would hope, for an actor of his frequently unrealized talent, that he is just marking time here. Opposite him, Fishburne seems to have given in to the consensus that audiences prefer him as Morpheus from the Matrix movies, and delivers all of his lines with that sly, rumbling baritone that suggests he has an ace or two up his sleeve (truthfully, we do prefer him as Morpheus, and if his part here is just a take-off from that role, then so what -- Precinct 13 is not the kind of movie where an actor breaks new ground, and anyway Fishburne is immensely likeable as the sly baritone). The same goes for Byrne, who is clearly channeling Alan Rickman at his most hawkish and sinister, even if, like Rickman, he is sometimes eloquent to a fault.
Fortunately, he is the villain in a movie that is equally (if not more) melodramatic than he is. There are probably at least a dozen other ways that some crooked cops could see to the death of a prisoner, none of them involving a frontal, military-style assault on a police precinct. But that is beside the point. Assault on Precinct 13 is all about the adrenaline-rush spectacle of well staged Hollywood action. Everything else, including what comes after, is irrelevant.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)