WhatzUp

Assault on Precinct 13
by Derek Neff

Assault on Precinct 13 would be the perfect movie to watch at the drive-in movies of yesteryear: listening to the dialogue through a dodgy monaural speaker, and watching the action through a fogged-up windshield, the film’s B-movie aspirations would feel right at home.

It’s New Years Eve, and Detroit’s Police Precinct 13 is down to a skeleton crew for the night. The place is closing down soon due to budget constraints, and the crew is only there to finish packing things up before being transferred to other precincts in the city. But a busload of criminals awaiting arraignment has been diverted to Precinct 13 at the last minute, and the officers’ once-peaceful night is about to become a bloodbath. One of the prisoners on the bus, you see, is Marion Bishop (played by Lawrence Fishburne, clearly slumming it), one of the city’s biggest crime lords. A small army of shadowy figures soon surrounds the building, intent on getting Bishop out of the building, and then killing everyone else to ensure there are no witnesses. Police Sgt. Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) takes it upon himself not only to protect his building, but to protect the lives of Bishop and the other prisoners as well, nasty as they may be, going so far as to let them out of their cells and arm them against the invaders.

If the plots sounds vaguely familiar, maybe that’s because Assault is a remake of a John Carpenter film of the same name from the 1970s, which was itself a retelling of the classic Howard Hawks’ western Rio Bravo. Despite this illustrious pedigree, the movie is just plain silly. If you require convincing character development, or an even remotely believable premise, then you have come to the wrong place, my friend.

I give director Jean-Francois Richet due credit for making no attempt whatsoever to water down his scenes so as to make a prissy PG-13 cut. Assault certainly earns its R rating; the violence is unstinting and the language unapologetically harsh, just as in so many of the 1970s movies I used to watch at the drive-in as a boy. Still, the set-up is so laughably contrived, and the characters are so flimsily developed, I can’t really recommend it. Unless, that, is, you have access to an old drive-in movie screen ...