Assault on Precinct 13

So i watched another car wreck of a film. I actually saw another over the weekend as well called A Day Without a Mexican (or something along those lines) - but I didn't even finish that one, so don't feel that i can savage it appropriately.

Enjoy!

Assault on Precinct 13

Remakes tend to be tedious affairs. They tend to drag through the mud perfectly good films and characters that you have enjoyed. In some cases, films that were pretty bad and pointless the first time around are thrown back into the studio system and then spewed back out in such a way that you wonder whose misbegotten idea it was to waste perfectly good money a second time over, all the while orphans across Africa are starving.

This film falls into that category.

Assault on Precinct 13 is a remake of an old John Carpenter film that never needed remaking. The basic premise a gang decides to take out a police precinct (lucky number 13) to recover or kill a mob leader inside. In the original the gang are a street gang angered at the deaths of colleagues, in the remake, they are cops trying to kill a bad guy (Laurence Fishburne) who could turn them all in. The only people between the bad cops and the bad guy are a motley crew of quasi-cops led by burned out druggie/drunk cop Ethan Hawke. Why is he burned out you might foolishly ask? Well, this is answered in the pre-credit sequence, where we see undercover narcotics cop Hawke participate in a botched drugs bust where two of his colleagues (one of whom seems a far too young and lithe girl to be an undercover cop) are killed.

The coup de grace in the opening scene is when the camera pans to behind the villain who has just shot Hawke’s partner and we are treated to the sight of the back of his head popping off as Hawke beats the fellow to the draw. We see daylight quite clearly through the hole in the villains head. Charming.

This gore is repeatedly replicated throughout the film. This is not the gore of a film like Saw, where we are never actually treated to seeing the intense physical misery imposed upon the characters, but rather the gore of the first half hour of Saving Private Ryan: very real looking injuries happening with the resulting carnage on visible display. Gore in movies is fine, but once this is coupled with the callous way that people are dispatched, one wonders what kind of a misanthropist the director must be (a French one as it turns out: Jean-François Richet). We watch as heroes and villains alike come to rather sticky ends as calculating killer’s dispatch them with a wanton abandon.

For example, the one woman who could pass as a love interest in the story (and is the only true innocent present as it turns out), is a psychotherapist who gets trapped in the precinct due to bad weather after coming by for a regular session with Hawke. She gets out only to be captured by the bad guys, and then is shot in the face by über-villain Gabriel Byrne. No remorse and no reprieve. Why did she need to be so punished? I suppose the point is that life is cruel, but usually movies have at least some justification behind the death of a character. Also: cruel in movies is fine, gives characters a cold edge: but meaningless cruelty without any plot support is kind of unnecessary. We do not linger on the scene enough to feel the evil that is meant to permeate from Byrne.

I am now bored by justifying this film, and will simply list the other irritating faults that it had. Don’t read on if you want to actually watch the film.

Brian Dennehy appears, and turns out to be a villain. Well, I could’ve told that from the beginning. Last time he was a hero, Reagan was in the White House (this may in fact be incorrect, but I really don’t care. Sounds grandiose).

Is there really a police precinct in the middle of a forest in the middle of Detroit?

Why is Drea de Matteo’s character necessary, except to slut it up in her charmingly revealing costume (don’t get me wrong, I like scantily clad women in my films, but they either need to be characters or serve a purpose beyond proving that some women prefer bad men and like to wear revealing outfits).

Which cretin thought it would be interesting to call your two heroic main characters Sergeant and Bishop. I suppose this is the writer/director’s way of demonstrating their veneration for men in uniform. But then why kill so many off in the actual film? A sort of cinematic karma? Who cares?

Survey says: unnecessary evil. Why did they do it? I didn’t even particularly enjoy the first one, so I suppose a better question is: why did I impose it upon myself?