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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Ethan Hawke and Maria Bello may slay you in this pulpy thriller remake, but the film itself is DOA.
Jan 19, 2005 | Although dozens of critics would eagerly point to the overflow of bad contemporary movies as evidence of the death of cinema, the real question is, why can't movies be worse? Or, more specifically, why can't anyone make good pulp anymore?
Jean-François Richet's remake of the 1976 el-cheapo John Carpenter thriller "Assault on Precinct 13" has moments of potential: It's set on New Year's Eve, when even the most wretched among us are susceptible to bleary-eyed sentimentality, the promise of new beginnings, and dialogue along the lines of "The Greeks called it eros and thanatos: sex and death" (uttered by a sexy thug played by Laurence Fishburne, no less). The picture is set in a rundown, soon-to-be-shuttered police precinct on the outskirts of Detroit, but it may as well be in the Yukon: The old brick building, nestled against a snowy forest, looks like part of a model-train setup, and a blizzard happens to be raging, too. The little figures inside that police headquarters -- some innocent, some not so innocent -- are all united in the desire to survive, seeing as they're under siege by baddies outside armed with grenades and automatic weapons. There's an aura of pulpy coziness around "Assault on Precinct 13" that's seductively appealing; in its best moments, it has the charm of a glitter-dusted Christmas card made lovingly by prison inmates.
But there's no killer instinct behind "Assault on Precinct 13": In fact, there's no instinct at all -- a great deal of thought may have gone into the making of "Assault on Precinct 13," but its tone and its rhythms are consistently out of whack. Richet, working from a screenplay by James DeMonaco, has no sense of the difference between being direct and bludgeoning. The movie's pulse beats irregularly, bumping and thumping in all the wrong places. Moments that should have been sustained are clipped too short, and vice versa. Characters we're just getting to know (and like) meet with cruel and sudden ends -- they're popped off with barely a blink of the shutter, rendered immediately inconsequential, as if Richet and DeMonaco just didn't know what else to do with them.
All of that's a shame, because some of the performers, at least, seem to understand what the tone of the material should be. Ethan Hawke plays Jake Roenick, a former undercover cop who's riven with guilt for a bad decision he made, one that caused the death of two of his colleagues. He's now a sergeant at ramshackle Precinct 13, although that precinct is about to be shut down -- this New Year's Eve is its last hurrah, and it's already beginning to look like something out of a ghost town.
"Assault on Precinct 13"
Directed by Jean-François Richet
Starring Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Maria Bello
But listen -- what's that we hear? Not the dancing and prancing of each little hoof, but the whirring of a prison bus careering along the icy road, its driver nearly blinded by the urgently falling snow. The bus is ferrying several evildoers from the center of Detroit to a far-off high-security detention center, but the weather is just too bad: The driver has to pull over at Precinct 13, where he begs Sgt. Roenick to let his prisoners spend the night.
