director
Jean-François Richet
screenwriter
James DeMonaco
based on
a screenplay by
John Carpenter
producers
Pascal Caucheteux
Jeffrey Silver
Stephane Sperry
Stephen Sperry
cinematographer
Robert Gantz
music
Graeme Revell
editor
Bill Pankow
cast
Ethan Hawke (Jake Roenick)
Laurence Fishburne (Marion Bishop)
Gabriel Byrne (Marcus Duvall)
John Leguizamo (Beck)
Ja Rule (Smiley)
Maria Bello (Alex Sabian)
Drea de Matteo (Iris Ferry)
Brian Dennehy (Jasper O'Shea)
Dorian Harewood (Gil)
Aisha Hinds (Anna)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 109m
u.s.
release: 1/19/05
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
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Back there in 1976, two years
before unleashing Halloween
on an unsuspecting world, John Carpenter established his bad-ass
street cred with the low-budget Assault on Precinct 13.
A tip of the hat to Rio Bravo, the movie worked
minimalist wonders with its stark, no-nonsense premise of cops
and criminals banding together to hold off a gang siege. The
new remake is okay for what it is, but it's the work of people
trying a little too consciously to be Carpenter-esque -- most
of the film is painted in varying tones of gun-metal blue, for
instance, just like an early Carpenter flick. Still, it's not
a work of sacrilege, either, especially considering that Carpenter's
original -- reportedly not among his favorites (like many directors
looking back on early work, he can only see the rookie stumbles)
-- was itself a loose remake of Howard Hawks' 1959 Western, and
Carpenter himself sort of remade it as the atrocious Ghosts
of Mars.
Ethan Hawke, as cadaverous
as ever (get the man a sandwich), leads the new cast as
tormented Detroit desk cop Jake Roenick, once a hotshot undercover
narc before a bust went bad. He's the one presiding over the
soon-to-be-closed Precinct 13 on New Year's Eve, during a hellacious
snowstorm that forces a bus full of convicts to dump its surly
cargo into 13's cells. Along with seasoned Irish cop Jasper (Brian
Dennehy, a welcome sight) and hot-to-trot secretary Iris (Drea
de Matteo), Jake grudgingly takes in the convicts, including
notorious gangster Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne, who must've
found the weight Hawke lost), who's the target of corrupt cops
(led by a clenched Gabriel Byrne) who want to whack him before
he testifies and implicates them.
James DeMonaco's script is
amusingly blunt about its character set-up, but also forgetful;
at one point a convict (Ja Rule) actually introduces himself
as a Libra, then pegs someone else as an Aries, but then never
waxes astrological again. The usefulness of one character, Jake's
shrink Alex Sabian (who implausibly gets stranded at the precinct),
is limited to the fact that she's played by Maria Bello, who
along with Drea de Matteo gets some of the typical John Carpenter
femaleness (smart, scared but tough) onto the screen. Indeed,
a lot of the characters here seem to be written (and acted) in
homage to Carpenter, which may explain why, despite the change
in premise and location, this Assault never quite feels
like its own film. (Carpenter's tribute to Rio Bravo,
on the other hand, declared its own personality loud and clear.)
It's decent imitation J.C., I suppose -- an homage twice removed.
Carpenter, I think, would have
been more interested in the convicts than in Jake's crisis of
confidence. John Leguizamo, acting like Steve Buscemi channeling
the Hitchhiker from Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, twitches and rants as the junkie prisoner
Beck, and Aisha Hinds has a potentially intriguing role as Anna,
a sullen young woman who insists she was wrongly arrested (we
never find out if she was or not). Laurence Fishburne, doing
a King of New York-meets-Morpheus turn, is so hipster-stoic-cool
he's practically immobile; can this be the same actor who was
so memorably unhinged in What's Love Got to do With It
as the manic-sadistic Ike Turner? The movie seems more interested
in Jake's Demerol addiction, or the shrink's OCD (boy, obsessive-compulsives
are really hot these days -- see The
Aviator, Monk, and Elektra).
I don't want to spoil the original
Assault's most famous moment for those of you who haven't
seen it, but suffice it to say that it involved a little girl
who wanted vanilla twist. It was Carpenter's signal to the audience
that all bets were off, that there was no shock he would spare
if realism called for it. There's no vanilla-twist girl in Assault
'05, which probably says more about the times than
about director Jean-François Richet's willingness to pull
out the stops. Richet, making his English-language debut here,
unveiled a film in 1997 called Ma 6-T va crack-er,
which one Internet Movie Database reviewer described as "a
film showing and encouraging violence and revolt." That
sounds like a film close to Carpenter's cynical heart, but all
Assault encourages is the occasional buzz of adrenaline
as most of its tiny cast is decimated. It's neither graceful
nor disgraceful; it just functions and then is over.
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