Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)
Directed by Jean-François Richet
On New Year's Eve, inside a police station that's about to be closed for good, officer Jake Roenick must cobble together a force made up cops and criminals to save themselves from a mob looking to kill mobster Marion Bishop.
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This formula would prove so resilient that Hawks would remake it in " El Dorado " (1966), John Carpenter would remake it as " Assault on Precinct 13 " (1976) and directors from Scorsese to Tarantino to Stone would directly reference it.
The new, two-disc set comes with a commentary track by critic Richard Schickel (who wrongly calls this Hawks' "last great" film) and filmmaker John Carpenter (who unofficially remade Rio Bravo twice, as Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars).
Adding a crooked-cops twist to the outnumbered-and-under-siege plot that John Carpenter lifted from "Rio Bravo" for his "original" 1976 B-movie shoot-'em-up, the new "Assault on Precinct 13" is a reasonably entertaining update of a reliable action-drama formula.
In 1976, John Carpenter directed his homage to Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” about a closing police station under siege and pushed a lot of non-PC buttons at the time when he showed a little girl gunned down by a gangster.
Today those times may have well and truly passed, but there is something of a seventies revival going on, filling our screens with ‘reimaginings’ of seventies gems like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , Dawn of the Dead , The Toolbox Murders , The Stepford Wives , and now Assault on Precinct 13 (or AP13, to give the remake its snappier, oh-so-Noughties title) – except that John Carpenter’s original low-budget siege flick from 1976 was itself a reimagining of Howard Hawks’ 1959 western Rio Bravo, and owed a considerable debt along the way to George A. Romero’s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), making it a story that really has been told many times before.
The siege as a narrative device runs throughout John Carpenter's work, but nowhere is it as raw and unvarnished as Assault on Precinct 13.
The following year, he wrote, directed, edited, and scored his first solo feature, Assault on Precinct 13, made for $100,000 and on little more than a two week schedule.
Two years before his 1978 breakout hit Halloween, director John Carpenter made a low-budget siege drama called Assault on Precinct 13.
One of the odder but more interesting film programs in the city is the one that opened yesterday at the Thalia: Roberto Rossellini's "Fear," made in 1954, the last of the extraordinary features in which Rossellini directed Ingrid Bergman, who was then his wife; and "Assault on Precinct 13," the 1976 film made by John Carpenter, who later directed the more notorious horror picture, "Halloween."
An uneasy, hippified version of a cowboys and Indians shoot-'em-up, John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars is an exhausted shade of the once-hip director's oeuvre, baldly stealing from his Assault on Precinct 13 before partially resurrecting later works The Fog, Escape from N.Y./L.A., The Thing, and even They Live in the focus on an interracial pair hooking up to kick alien ass.
It is Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13 meets Carpenter’s Vampires meets Poltergeist, all of which are superior films.
At times, Ghosts of Mars plays like a highlight reel of Carpenter's other films: elements of The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, and others are liberally spread across the landscape.
The plot borrows heavily from Carpenter's second film, the outstanding Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which itself was a remake of Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo.
I think Carpenter should yield to that feeling, because after this tired recycling of his own earlier successful Assault on Precinct 13 (set to an awful heavy metal soundtrack) he has nothing new to say . . .
Today those times may have well and truly passed, but there is something of a seventies revival going on, filling our screens with ‘reimaginings’ of seventies gems like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , Dawn of the Dead , The Toolbox Murders , The Stepford Wives , and now Assault on Precinct 13 (or AP13, to give the remake its snappier, oh-so-Noughties title) – except that John Carpenter’s original low-budget siege flick from 1976 was itself a reimagining of Howard Hawks’ 1959 western Rio Bravo, and owed a considerable debt along the way to George A. Romero’s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), making it a story that really has been told many times before.
Its Fort Apache scenario of an undermanned police station besieged by an army of faceless invaders remains sharp and compelling, and in the hands of French director Jean-François Richet leaps full-bore into the 21st century.
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(Think James Cameron's character development in Aliens .)
John Leguizamo ("Empire") provides both comic relief and tension as Beck, a junkie who cottons on to Jake's habit.
After an opening that reminds of the breathless epileptic dirt of Joe Carnahan's Narc , director Jean-François Richet takes control of his frenetic camera and presents the action with an unusual amount of clarity for a modern shake-and-bake opera.
Richet is clearly going for a Panic Room sort of vibe, but director of photography Robert Gantz is clearly no Darius Khondji (the ceaseless darkness eventually becomes oppressive because of this difference).
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You've got your motor-mouthed junkie (John Leguizamo of Moulin Rouge! ).
But in this remake, written by James DeMonaco ( "The Negotiator" ), many plot points are too obvious (like who among the precinct's defenders will become a traitor) and many more are questionable.
Matching the excellent work of these actors, director Jean-Francois Richet (All About Love) moves James DeMonacos (The Negotiator) smart screenplay along with fast-paced action, and cinematographer Robert Gantz (Mindhunters) makes the most of the wintry setting as well as the close quarters of jail cells and a run-down building.