Customer Reviews

Assault on Precinct 13 (Full Screen Edition)

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(44)
3 star:		(29)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Going in I was expecting an Action film with two-dimensional characters and loads of gunfire caught on film with shaky camera shots to make them seem more violent than they already are. Instead of adhering to conventional 'Action' film nonsense and one-liners, however, the makers of this film have created a story where the characters are either likeable or interesting to watch and the violence is both realistic and often incredibly brutal. There are some cliche' plot twists that appear at the expected times, but to the credit of these storytellers they do not dwell on them as if the audience should somehow be wowed or shocked by the revelation(s). Thus any predictability is overshadowed by quicksilver action sequences or character-driven moments that are equally intense. This film has a strong cast of actors led by a very capable director and a fantastic production staff that give this film more style and substance than is typical of the genre. The photography is excellent and elevates the look of this movie to a highly professional level, as do all the technical aspects such as stuntwork and gunfire during the many firefights. The action is bloody, to put it mildly, with some gruesome kills that made even a seasoned Action film fan like myself cringe and wince. What I especially love about this film and with very few other Action flicks is that all the characters either get hurt or mortally wounded at some point during the story. No one escapes unscathed. In most other Action movies it gets ridiculous to see characters running through a swarm of bullets and not getting hit; for that alone, "Assault on Precinct 13" should be raised above the average Action film fare and revered for its exceptional use of violence as a means to an end rather than as a flashy way in which to deceive an audience into forgiving a film for falling flat during the quieter moments. Both Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburn lead the way with their star-power and the rest of the cast rally around them to help the viewers care about each and every one of them. This film is a pleasant surprise and a solid addition to the Action film genre. Thank you.

I'll cut to the chase. It's a decent flick with a few really kick a$$ scenes that COULD have been MUCH better, but as it is, it's only barely worth a rental. Certainly its not worth a purchase. Why? Read on.

1. Apparently, many people in the flick are AMAZING shots. During the flick, not less than people get killed with perfect headshots ranging in distances from 150+ feet away to point-blank range. Every one winds up with their eyes wide open and a neat little hole in their head (even when some of the ammunition used would have made their heads explode like melons if they took a shot like that). From .50 cals to .9mm, it doesn't matter.

2. Alternatively, the same people who get amazing headshots in once scene are the same people who couldn't hit the side of a barn with a shotgun in the next scene. In one part, there are four people, standing perfectly still firing full automatics at one another from a distance of about 12 feet, and not only does no one get killed, no one even takes a hit! What?

3. Lawrence Fishburne is essentially Morpheus again. As soon as he started talking I was like "you gotta be kidding me, right?" Same "cool" mannerisms, same tone of voice, same inflections, same quasi-religious comments, its almost comical. I was wondering when he was going to start talking about Neo.

4. Speaking of which, its interesting that apparently Mr. Fishburnes character is this incredibly powerful gangster, yet no one from his organization seems to care when he's arrested, taken into custody, or anything. For such a dangerous man, he certainly seems to have to deal with the situation completely on his own. There isn't even a hint that anyone from his gang cares at all that he's been taken away.

5. There is one scene where the bad guys flood the building with laser scopes. I assume that each laser sight is attached to a rifle or machine pistol, right? So what happened to all of them? There were like 30! Did they all just go home after that scene?

6. The "bad guys" obviously just want to kill everyone in the precinct. There is no indication that they want ANYONE alive. So if that's the case, why do they ONLY rely on flash grenades? At least twice they chucked flash-bangs at the main characters and successfully blinded them, when a simple grenade would have taken them all out.

Maybe I'm being too cynical, but when I watch movies like this, it makes me wonder how stupid the director thinks the audience is. We have to suspend disbelief to a certain degree, but when a movie makes you go "Oh, PLEASE! Is this a joke?" more than a few times, you know they went wrong somewhere.

In one of the featurettes on the DVD, Star Ethan Hawke claims that this was the best script to an action film he had ever read. If this was the best that I would hate to see the worst. This remake of the John Carpenter Cult classic is ridiculous on so many levels. Suspension of disbelief? No...how about suspending rational thought and logic as the totally impossible set of circumstances that lead to the siege are among the most far-fetched ever put on film.

Lawrence Fishburne is a Detroit crime boss named Bishop who is being transported to jail along with the usual cast of two-dimensional action characters including Ja-rule As small-time crook Smiley (don't know why since he never smiles) and John Leguizamo as Beck, a crack head who is on your nerves so quickly that you pray he's killed soon.

Well on the way an accident and a fierce winter storm just happens to divert the bus to Precinct 13 which just happens to be closing down and thus just happens to have only a crew of three people and just happens to have all their communications shut down and is evidently in such a remote part of the city that citizens do not hear the thousands of rounds of gunfire and explosions taking place and call the cops. It may be Detroit, but even that's well beyond normal reason. Oh and somehow the crooks manage to interfere and knock out the cell phones as well. That's quite a trick!

Soon, some crooked cops led by Gabriel Byrne lead an attack on the precinct in order to kill Bishop before he can expose them at his trial. Ethan Hawke is Sgt. Jake Roenick, another two-dimensional burned-out cop feeling guilt over two of his partners getting killed in a shootout, eight months earlier. Along with him is Brian Dennehy who just happens to be retiring, and Drea de Matteo playing her usual smart-mouthed New Yorker...even though she's supposed to be in Detroit. Oh and Maria Bello plays a shrink working with Ethan Hawke who just HAPPENS to get stuck in the storm and has to stay at the precinct as weel. Roenick soon arms his prisoners to fight off the cops. Seemingly the cops are all former Delta Force members or Navy Seals because they're all armed to the teethe with assault rifles, night vision goggles, and flash grenades. Yet despite their overwhelming numbers and weaponry, the bad guys find themselves picked off one-by-one.

The sad thing is that this could have, and should have been a good film. But rather than handle the film with some semblance of subtlety, French director Jean-Francois Richet just tries to bludgeon watchers over the head at every moment. Extremely disappointing.

Assault on Precinct 13 ('05) compares with Assault on Precinct 13 ('76) only in concept. The former is a big budget, star-studded, cop drama while the latter is a lower budget, gritty, near remake of Night of the Living Dead using gang members in place of zombies. While the old John Carpenter film might loose certain viewers due to its slow, deliberate pacing, it has remained a classic because of its many layers and subtext. For the new Richet version, a dramatic cop vs. gang boss plot has been stamped in and all layers, subtext, and richness tossed out. However, the stamped in plot is pretty well put together, with its weakest most forgettable moment installed as a preface (haven't filmmakers realized that prefaces and flashbacks almost always signal a script problem?). The preface serves as bad character motivation for Ethan Hawke's Sergeant Roenick. Go get your popcorn after the opening previews and miss the `undercover blues' setup as to why Roenick turns into a pill-popping loser only to save the day by the end. That aside, the film works as an action romp. The shoot-outs are good, tension always fills the air, and there are even a few zombie references: the bad guys take multiple hits and just keep coming, they are all suited in such a way as to be stripped of individuality, and some of the gorier kills hearken back to the Romero classics. Byrne and Freeman are fun to watch, as both take their roles coolly, using smallness rather than the over the top bigness that Hawke uses (not that effectively). John Leguizamo and Ja Rule play throw away characters, and that's exactly what happens to them (and you won't be disappointed when it happens, believe me.) So, while it's no cop/horror/masterpiece... it is a fun Saturday night action flick.

This movie is a travesty that only proves that sometimes a great movie can be remade so badly that it loses all reasonable resemblance to the original. This movie is so bad that it takes the premise of a group of cops and convicts under attack from a killer gang (and most real gangs are organized drug dealing killers) in a closing precinct building into a idiotic story about bad cops attacking the station instead. It's badly written and in spite of some good actors it's just a nasty movie without much merit. How many times in history have gangs surrounded and attacked someplace and murdered kids even to get what they want? many times... how many times has this happened with a group of bad cops? and even worse cops who act like untrained idiots! oh well. they lost the premise and real menace that a true evil gang can deliver because they (in some cities) are already shooting up and killing innocent people routinely , including kids who get in their way. Sure there
are some bad cops; but this movie has no charm and seems mindlessly hateful about cops in general. (I am not a cop by the way) Skip this one and watch the original which is a crime movie classic!.

This is one remake that we really didn't need. The original, as dated as it is, could be considered the movie that made John Carpenter's career. The original, made in 1976, is not a bad movie, if you surrender yourself to Carpenter's synthesizer stylings and a plotline that defies logic. A gang of bad guys leads an assault on a police precinct, turning the whole precinct into a war zone for one night. The main problem with doing a remake of this story is that it was a difficult concept to believe in 1976, and there have been quite a few technological advances in the last thirty years. Unless they were going to do this as a period piece, it's just not the kind of story that you can do in the age of high-speed internet, PDAs, cell phones and laptop computers.

The filmmakers' solution to this was to have the whole thing take place on New Year's Eve and also to build into the plot the fact that the cops in the doomed precinct are getting ready to move to a new precinct. If that sounds like flimsy logic to you, raise your hand. So what we are treated to in the first 10 minutes of the movie are a lot of really painful scenes of exposition where characters say things like, "Seeing as how it's New Year's Eve, and I've shut down all the computers and the phone lines are down, we might as well get drunk!"

The set-up is difficult to believe, and it's almost as if the actors all know it. It's really painful to watch actors like Gabriel Byrne, Lawrence Fishburne, Ethan Hawke and John Leguiziamo struggling through this ridiculous garbage. If you can survive this Assualt on Logic, and you can suspend your disbelief in spite of overwhelming odds, you'll get to see the bad guys attack the precinct. From there, it's one long, continuous shoot-out. It is, of course, interspersed with scenes where we find out that some of the cops in the precinct are not entirely good, and some of the criminals are not entirely bad. What's most amazing is that EVERYONE in the movie gets shot right between the eyes. I'm not even kidding. Every single character gets shot right in the forehead, whether it's by close range or by sniper rifle. Admittedly, I don't know too much about shooting people, but it seems like the odds of everyone getting shot right between the eyes are a bit of a longshot. Ah well, it gave the director plenty of opportunity to show actors staring off into space with a tiny red hole in their forehead. Maybe the director was trying to make a statement.

On the whole, the production values are good and the cinematography isn't bad. It's just a completely ridiculous scenario, badly executed with dialog that would get cut from the worst soap opera. The actors, talented as most of them are, seem to know that they've signed on to be in a turkey, so they turn in performances that feel stale and uninspired. In the end, you just have to wonder if we really needed a remake of this movie, especially when it turned out to be so much worse than the original.

A bit of a mixed bag here - the characters are a bit more three dimensional than in the original, and for the first half hour or so you actually think this one could be an improvement on John Carpenter's cult classic. But when the assualt begins, things start to come apart. With the exception of the attack where Ethan Hawke decides to arm the convicts, all of the action sequences are dull and feel padded out (as if the director had an extra thirteen minutes to fill). I think it's because even with all their hi-tech equipment and body armour, the corrupt cops come across as a bunch of clowns. And there simply aren't enough of them (unlike the seemingly endless hordes of John Carpenter's film). At one stage, you even get the impression that the beseiged outnumber the attackers. It also seems just a wee bit implausable - maybe the bigger budget and better production values have simply served to show up the plot-holes of the premise. There are a couple of unexpected twists (with characters who you think will die staying alive and visca versa), but on the whole, this is a pretty tepid affair that lacks the necessary tension to keep things exciting.

Ethan Hawke leads a well rounded cast starring as booze and drug dependent yet ethical Detroit police Sergeant Roenick in the action thriller "Assault on Precinct 13". Eight months after a bungled drug bust in which he was wounded and two partners were killed, he finds himself in decommissioned precinct 13. He was assigned the regretable job of manning the nearly barren station on New Years Eve, with old police veteran Jasper played by an aging Brian Dennehy and precinct miniskirted secretary Iris Ferry played by the sexy Drea DeMatteo.

Concurrently big shot gangster Marion Bishop played authoritatively by Laurence Fishburne had been apprehended for a cop killing. He was being transported by bus to a secure lockup with three other perps during a driving winter snowstorm. With driving extremely treacherous the bus was ordered to wait out the storm at the deserted precinct 13.

Much to the chagrin of all involved, Fishburne was in cohoots with a legion of rogue and dirty cops led by Gabriel Byrne playing Lt. Duvall. Byrne and his minions could not allow Fishburne to reveal the details of their arrangement. They aimed to silence Fishburne, Hawke and the others trapped in the precinct house using an Alamo-like siege to kill all those that could implicate them.

This action packed thriller necessitated the collaboration of Hawke and Fishburne and all the cops and prisoners if they were to survive the attack.

The acting performances were good for the most part, also featuring Maria Bello as a conflicted police psychologist and the immensely talented John Leguizamo playing the brain fried junkie Beck.

Let us forget for a moment that Assault on Precinct 13 is a remake of a classic action movie. Taken completely on its own merits Assault on Precent 13 is a debacle. Lets start with the Rio Bravo style scenario. About a dozen people are trapped in a decaying police station in Detroit (If the Detroit location is giving you Robocop warm and fuzzies stop right now. It could have easily said Topeka in the opening credits and nothing would have changed. In fact the last bit in the forest would have made more sense.) Surrounding them are our bad guys; corrupt cops. Now I know what your thinking. Corrupt cops? Were the Nazis and drug cartels busy that weekend? Of course these are no ordinary cops. These guys are right of the cover of the latest Tom Clancy video game. Yup we have body armor; helicopters; laser sights; night vision goggles the works. So we have thirty or so high speed, low drag S.W.A.T./Special Forces types armed to the teeth verses 4 cops (drunk), 2 women in party dresses and half a dozen criminals. So how do our heroes defend themselves? Truth is they can't. They all should be dead within ten minutes tops. (Not to mention the characters inside have an annoying habit of walking past the windows.) Now an illogical scenario is no reason to completely pan a movie especially a B style action film. However with the exception of Laurence Fishburne and Ethan Hawke all the other characters seemed to be comic relief. While Ja-Rules and Leguizamo's characters are bad enough. It's Aisha Hind's minstrel show that takes the cake. Rarely has a more stereotypical African American character appeared on the modern screen. Her performance resembles a frat boy in blackface and drag acting ghetto. I thought Gabriel Byrne was a great bad guy, too bad there wasn't more of him in the movie. If you want a throiller with a good plot, this isn't for you. If you want a lot of shoot em up action, this is your movie.

Hard to come anywhere close to Carpenter's original Assault on Precinct 13, but of course somebody had to try. Also not really sure why this high octane American caper was handed over to a relatively inexperienced French director. Not that Jean-Francois Richet did a horrible job, but this script is sprayed with a ridiculous amount of plot holes and ludicrous developments. However, this remake does boast an all-star cast and a sufficient budget (30 mil), so it's not a total waste. Plus there are enough thrills injected here to get all of you action junkie's blood boiling.

Ethan Hawke plays Sgt. Jake Roenick, a battle tested cop who is still suffering from emotional trauma acquired on the job. He's given a safe desk job at an old Detroit precinct that is in the process of closing. So Jake and a group of friends/coworkers settle in to prepare for a little shindig. But the night is about to get much more exciting, and not just because it happens to be New Years Eve.

Due to a snow storm, a bus transferring a few prisoners is forced to make an unexpected stop. Amongst the dangerous cargo happens to be the notorious crime boss Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne). Believe me, he's one bad dude. Anyway, before long the station in under heavy attack, with Bishop the supposed target.

(MINOR SPOILER)
At first you think it's probably some gangsters looking to free their boss. But no, it's actually some dirty cops that don't want Mr. Bishop to rat them out in court (not really a spoiler--that fact is revealed early in the movie). So the cops and the crooks are forced to momentarily teamup in order to stave off these attacks. The action is now set to get fast and violent. Only problem is you gotta watch out for the wayward casualties of logic.

Like annoying plot holes and such...where do I begin?
-bus transfer of a famous kingpin on a snowy New Years Eve night in the Motor City?
-sick criminal passenger is enough to change destination?
-cell phones, radios, telephones not working at station?
-how many psychiatrists work at the police department (on New Years Eve no less)?
-why would cops launch a "secret" attack on a precinct? Wait til he is transferred maybe?

But that's not to say this film is all bad. Like I mentioned before, it has some pretty solid action stunts and gripping thrills. There is a decent amount of tension as you anticipate loyalties evaporating at any second between the newly formed team. Even though the story itself is a little hard to swallow, the cast makes you forget much of this. The lead men are both in roles that seem to totally fit their personas. Hawke as the heroic, charismatic, smart-aleck cop with deep seeded issues. Fishburne is also great as the no-nonsense gangster that has a commanding presence. There are other actors that give stellar performances, such as Maria Bello, John Leguizamo, Ja Rule, and Brian Dennehy.

All in all, this ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 is watchable but highly inferior to Carpenter's original. 2.5 stars.