Art Attack
A cold January shoot-em-up scores some points as a resurrected John Carpenter classic. (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: Far more pleasing than you're likely to give it credit for.
The Downside: Still nowhere near as good as the original.
There's a basic problem with remakes- not just making them, but watching them, too. I remember sitting through that curious oddity from 1998 that was Gus Van Sant's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, thinking it was a fairly good movie; after all, it did what was expected of it. Still, though, it was interesting to see the movie get buffeted by the hurricane-force critical winds on both sides who raked Van Sant over the coals for both having the audacity to try to update a classic and not bothering to change it in any way, as if they would have been happier if the location was moved from a motel to a brothel and they decked out Norman Bates in a Superfly-style pimp get-up. As much as we embrace the movies we love, there really doesn't seem to be much point in redressing an old movie in the same old clothes.
It's a matter of personal taste whether or not you're likely to consider John Carpenter's original 1976 Assault on Precinct 13 a classic, but as a film that has inspired this updated 2005 version, it has a pretty significant birthright to lean on considering that it itself was meant to be a contemporary update of Howard Hawks' desperadoes-surrounding-the-jail western Rio Bravo. Despite its origins, this remake of Assault bares little or no resemblance to a western- the "from the producers of Training Day" copy waving like a banner for a movie that holds onto its ambitions to be a gritty, hip-hop piece of urban action fodder to its Kevlar-suited heart. The 1976 version actually shares more in communion with what would be Carpenter's next film, and the one that would put him on the map- Halloween, than this one. In the earlier film a secluded Los Angeles ghetto police precinct was put under siege by a heavily armed band of marauding thugs with only a sheriff's deputy, a couple of crooks, and a few precious rounds of ammunition to hold them back. The movie worked- if only because it proved how much of a splash a B-movie with a budget that couldn't put a down payment on a luxury car today (or pay for the catering bill on its own remake) could make. Assault looked like el-cheapo gun slinging, guerrilla filmmaking fare which is where Carpenter was in his own, squeezing out tremendous amounts of bang for his relatively muted buck. Like Halloween, Assault was really more of an urban horror movie that used the faceless randomness of city violence instead of the faceless Shape with a really large butcher knife as an engine of fear. It's execution was downright eerie- the way the gang members never spoke, just executed their plan with cold, calculating precision and then seemingly disappearing into nothingness. I still watch the moments of silent cars being pushed as shields along the yards between the station and the surrounding woods and get the shivers.
The remake, though, isn't much up for trying to disturb the senses. It's a pretty much WYSWYG deal- what you see is what you get and considering that its ad campaign just seems to delight in spilling every possible can of beans in sight, you can't say you'll find many surprises.
Except, though, how well executed it is. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't stand in the candle light of the original and is in a completely different solar system from anything I'd consider great, but it has its ducks in a row. It manages to keep a plot that only grows creakier and more preposterous with time fairly well oiled up until the end and its pace keeps the juices flowing. How much more are we supposed to ask for?
Assault transplants its action from Los Angeles to Detroit which is shot like a cold, gray, isolated industrial dystopia (all the better for the feel of the film). Instead of Austin Stoker taking up the helm of a dilapidated station on its closing night, we're given Ethan Hawke's Jake Roenick, a former narcotics cop now bound to a desk job through a set of tragic circumstances that I'm beginning to think are sold to screenwriters as a kit. Hawke on the right side of a gun has always seemed like a stretch, especially after Training Day, but the opening moments of the movie as he tries to spin a Russian drug lord into a deal are a manic-grabber and a little bit of a let down since we never get the same kind of acting-energy spike through the rest of the film. The apple cart on this snowbound New Year's Eve is upset when a detoured prison bus drops off a load of prisoners, including notorious mobster Marion Bishop. Bishop is played up as one of the most feared and wanted men in all of Detroit, so much so that urban legends about him having survived taking five bullets and once ripping a man's spine out abound, but early on his street cred takes a beating when he's arrested in a sting so simple-minded the Keystone Cops could have pulled it off without a hitch. Suddenly, the power goes out, the phones go out, and in the first of a few pretty tenuous logic stretches, all radios and cell phones stop working.
That's when men with very large guns start trying to kill everybody.
Since Assault's commercials don't hesitate to rob its own storyline blind, I don't feel the slightest guilt in revealing that the mysterious attackers aren't Bishop's cronies, but rather crooked Detroit cops who are out to make sure that Bishop never has the chance to finger them at trial. To fight back, Precinct 13's holding cells are cleaned out and the crooks are handed weapons- everything from pistols to a tommy gun to assault rifles. Unfortunately, while the John Carpenter version got a lot of tension mileage out of a small band of survivors fending off an onslaught with a literal handful of bullets, the guns in the remake never seem to run out, unless they are in the hands of a villain who needs to reload, thus giving a Good Guy the opportunity to get the jump on him.
What's impressive, though, is how strongly Assault keeps the doubts at bay before all believability is jettisoned at the end (what, you really think no one would notice the helicopter?). It moves at a fairly brisk clip and while I would have preferred stark terror to an adrenaline rush, it does maintain a dour sense of claustrophobia- even if cops in special ops gear aren't nearly as spooky as Carpenter's phantasm-like automatons. Part of the reason may be in the reworked characters, especially those on the wrong side of the jail house doors. Rapper Ja Rule has a minor presence as a con man who talks about himself in the third person (strangely, this is all he adds to the film) and John Leguizamo is somewhat amusing as a junkie who is so much of a motor-mouth it's impossible to tell when he's high and when he's crashing. Laurence Fishburne tries to cash in some of that Morpheus Matrix vibe as Bishop. The stark, survivalist realism of the criminals, especially Bishop, is a change from the kind of slightly-hokey crime-as-another-code-of-honor mantra that the first film's Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) made so intriguing.
By its denouement, the foot slips off the gas and whatever scraps of sense the movie could hold onto suddenly dissolve as the siege spills out into a cat-and-mouse hunt- in the woods- in the middle of downtown Detroit. Uh-huh. Hey, whatever. No one argued that Assault on Precinct 13 would have much of a brain in its head. All I've got to go on are my gut reactions and as someone who truly admired the first film as a blueprint for how to set mood and atmosphere in a thriller, I was extremely skeptical of a remake. It doesn't accomplish what its predecessor did, but it never intended to. It's a new time, a new way of thinking, and I guess I should be happy that Assault is tuned in to the fact that a remake can never, and should never, be a mirror image of its original.
I guess. B
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