(Re) Making a Movie - Day 26

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

On the day before a Los Angeles police precinct is set to be closed, officer Ethan Bishop gets in over his head when a man who has just killed a high-ranking member of a violent gang stumbles into the door. The gang is out for blood and they will not stop until they get payback for their lost brother. Unfortunately the precinct is staffed only by Bishop, a couple members of the support staff, and two criminals locked up in the holding cells. One of the criminals happens to be Napolean Wilson, convicted murderer and by all means a very dangerous man. And Wilson may be Bishop’s only hope.

Assault on Precinct 13 is the first full and proper movie by John Carpenter and it remains easily one of his best. Few of Carpenter’s films play better to his personal strengths: a low budget, a simple concept, quiet, tension, and spurts of sudden violence broken up by long periods of waiting for the violence to start. A bit of a mash-up of Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead with a then-contemporary LA slum setting. It’s a Great White Shark of a movie and attempting to imitate or improve upon it is a fool’s errand.

Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)

Sgt. Jake Roenick has been put in charge of a nothing police precinct in the city of Detroit after a bad bust ended his career as an undercover cop. On New Year’s eve, a bus carrying major drug lord Marion Bishop to jail gets sidelined at Precinct 13 due to a snow storm. Now a frankly absurd number of corrupt police officers are gunning for Bishop before he can see the inside of a courtroom and reveal their crimes and the precinct unfortunately only has Sgt. Roenick, an older cop on the edge of retirement, a secretary, Roenick’s psychiatrist, and four criminals (including Bishop himself).

Is it a good remake?

Not at all. Assault on Precinct 13 works so well because it’s such a simple concept and because it has a simple execution. Nothing about the remake is simple. Now obviously you can’t do what the original did, Carpenter barely skirted the thorny concept of gangs vs. LA cops by making the gang in his movie some sort of mythic multi-ethnic gang seemingly devoted to little more than simple chaos and not any sort of political unrest. That shit barely flew in the 70s and it wasn’t going to work in the ‘00s, so corrupt cops seems like a good angle, particularly in Detroit where the police corruption is basically just an accepted fact. The problem is there’s just too many moving pieces, the gang in the original movie is unknowable and mysterious, we know what’s happening with the corrupt cops in the remake and we continually check in with their leader Gabriel Byrne. It also could not be more obvious that Brian Dennehy is working with the corrupt cops from the jump, their attempts to make him seem like some uptight old-fashioned cop who’s otherwise on our heroes’ side doesn’t fly. Even the siege is lackluster and the movie completely abandons it at the climax in favor of something much more disjointed and boring.

Does it stand on its own?

Not really, no. I love Ethan Hawke, Gabriel Byrne, Maria Bello, Brian Dennehy, and basically everyone who’s in this movie but I sure don’t love them here. Only Dennehy really keeps his reputation as one of the greats here with basically the role of “guy who hides his zombie bite.”

I love Larry Fishburne but sometime around 1993 he started going by Laurence and decided that that wild charisma that had made him such an electrical screen presence needed to go. Laurence Fishburne is fine but his low-key energy just doesn’t have the same appeal as Larry’s did. We didn’t see Larry again until 2010’s Predators and he’s thankfully popped back up in spirit semi-regularly since. Assault on Precinct 13 is basically the nadir of Fishburne’s Laurence phase.

And then there’s the other prisoners. First I want to say that Aisha Hinds is great, there aren’t a lot of celebrated women character actors but Hinds deserves praise, she’s a great presence in anything she’s in no matter how small and a very versatile actor capable of playing just about any character you can imagine. Hind’s Anna is one of the best things about this movie. But then there’s Ja Rule and John Leguizamo.

Ja Rule is simple dumb, a sort of pimp or maybe hustler type character named Smiley who refers to himself in the third person and comes off as cocky. Leguizamo though is swinging for the fences, he plays some sort of strung out conspiracy nut criminal and his twitchy energy threatens to unseat The Pest as his most annoying film role. He’s sort of comedic relief but not really and has a bunch of lines where he drones on like crazy. This role is beneath Leguizamo and this performance is frankly embarrassing from an actor with this much talent.

This movie is a mess, basically all the horror has been stripped from the movie making it some sort of action drama that’s neither particularly dramatic or action packed. It’s a bad script and a poorly executed screenplay that leaves a pretty heft group of great character actors waffling to keep things together and failing. The only good thing I can say about this movie is that fortunately everyone barely remembers it so it’s not around to tarnish the original.

Watch, Toss, or Buy?

Toss it.