"Assault on Precinct 13" is a rendezvous with that ex you once loved. Even if you didn't see John Carpenter's 1976 original, odds are you've seen "The Rock," "Con Air," "Rio Bravo," "Night of the Living Dead," "Training Day" or one of the countless other films from which "Assault" steals in this blood-splattered, double-crossing popcorn flick. As entertaining as this movie is at times, a lack of ambition and originality dooms it as an enjoyable but entirely forgettable viewing experience.
"Assault on Precinct 13" tells the story of burnt-out Sgt. Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) of the soon-to-be-demolished Precinct 13 in downtown Detroit, and a ragtag bunch of underlings and prisoners who band together to fight "the Man." "The Man" is personified here by dirty cop Marcus Duvall (flatly played by Gabriel Byrne), who wants to shut up mobster kingpin Marion Bishop (a scowling Laurence Fishburne), and finds it necessary to kill all witnesses in the process.
The plot is riddled with genre cliches that range from a raging storm that makes travel difficult to a cop with a troubled past who has given up hope for a bright future to a wise, aging cop one day from retirement. Alliances are questioned, speeches are made and tense moments are broken with tired comedy routines by the oddball cast of inmates, including the society-hating, strung-out junkie Beck (a manic John Leguizamo) and the egomaniacal drifter Smiley (Jeffrey Atkins, aka Ja Rule). An appropriate amount of treacherous coalitions and seemingly hopeless moments add a touch of suspense. However, the outcome is never really in question, even as Duvall escalates the violence with snipers with laser scopes and flash bombs and helicopters.
What keeps the movie going are the few surprises that French director Jean-Francois Richet includes: constant action and solid acting. A few people whom the audience pegs as survivors meet untimely deaths, and the gunfire never lets up from the opening to the closing credits. Hawke takes the stock role of an emotionally unstable cop and fleshes it out nicely, and Leguizamo and Fishburne turn in sound, believable performances.
The cinematography is often striking if never terribly original. But Richet's obsession with lingering shots of head wounds is a distracting and surreal disruption from the otherwise quick pace of the film. Additionally, the opening sequence is so fantastic and well filmed that in comparison, the rest of the movie seems like a slowly deflating letdown.
"Assault on Precinct 13" is not killed by its unoriginality but by its inability to flawlessly execute a hackneyed story. Sometimes it's a lot of fun, but too often the film seems content to rehash stale dialogue and circumstances in unspectacular fashion. Flaws in logic pop up at various points; they weaken the audience's connection with the characters and their dilemmas. The relationships are also too tired to steal any interest from the action.
It would be easy to buy your ticket, settle in for a comforting few hours and simply turn your brain off. But just like reuniting with that old flame, you're never going to have a great experience settling for what's already been done. Instead, go seek out something original and moving and put your quest for comfort on hold while you look for the extraordinary.